Daily Papers

Complex logical reasoning tasks require a long sequence of reasoning, which a large language model (LLM) with chain-of-thought prompting still falls short. To alleviate this issue, neurosymbolic approaches incorporate a symbolic solver. Specifically, an LLM only translates a natural language problem into a satisfiability (SAT) problem that consists of first-order logic formulas, and a sound symbolic solver returns a mathematically correct solution. However, we discover that LLMs have difficulties to capture complex logical semantics hidden in the natural language during translation. To resolve this limitation, we propose a Compositional First-Order Logic Translation. An LLM first parses a natural language sentence into newly defined logical dependency structures that consist of an atomic subsentence and its dependents, then sequentially translate the parsed subsentences. Since multiple logical dependency structures and sequential translations are possible for a single sentence, we also introduce two Verification algorithms to ensure more reliable results. We utilize an SAT solver to rigorously compare semantics of generated first-order logic formulas and select the most probable one. We evaluate the proposed method, dubbed CLOVER, on seven logical reasoning benchmarks and show that it outperforms the previous neurosymbolic approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art results.

Recently, simultaneous translation has gathered a lot of attention since it enables compelling applications such as subtitle translation for a live event or real-time video-call translation. Some of these translation applications allow editing of partial translation giving rise to re-translation approaches. The current re-translation approaches are based on autoregressive sequence generation models (ReTA), which generate tar-get tokens in the (partial) translation sequentially. The multiple re-translations with sequential generation inReTAmodelslead to an increased inference time gap between the incoming source input and the corresponding target output as the source input grows. Besides, due to the large number of inference operations involved, the ReTA models are not favorable for resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose a faster re-translation system based on a non-autoregressive sequence generation model (FReTNA) to overcome the aforementioned limitations. We evaluate the proposed model on multiple translation tasks and our model reduces the inference times by several orders and achieves a competitive BLEUscore compared to the ReTA and streaming (Wait-k) models.The proposed model reduces the average computation time by a factor of 20 when compared to the ReTA model by incurring a small drop in the translation quality. It also outperforms the streaming-based Wait-k model both in terms of computation time (1.5 times lower) and translation quality.

In this work we introduce S-TREK, a novel local feature extractor that combines a deep keypoint detector, which is both translation and rotation equivariant by design, with a lightweight deep descriptor extractor. We train the S-TREK keypoint detector within a framework inspired by reinforcement learning, where we leverage a sequential procedure to maximize a reward directly related to keypoint repeatability. Our descriptor network is trained following a "detect, then describe" approach, where the descriptor loss is evaluated only at those locations where keypoints have been selected by the already trained detector. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method, with S-TREK often outperforming other state-of-the-art methods in terms of repeatability and quality of the recovered poses, especially when dealing with in-plane rotations.

In this paper we present a step-by-step approach to long-form text translation, drawing on established processes in translation studies. Instead of viewing machine translation as a single, monolithic task, we propose a framework that engages language models in a multi-turn interaction, encompassing pre-translation research, drafting, refining, and proofreading, resulting in progressively improved translations. Extensive automatic evaluations using Gemini 1.5 Pro across ten language pairs show that translating step-by-step yields large translation quality improvements over conventional zero-shot prompting approaches and earlier human-like baseline strategies, resulting in state-of-the-art results on WMT2024.

In this work, we introduce sequence-to-sequence language resources for Catalan, a moderately under-resourced language, towards two tasks, namely: Summarization and Machine Translation (MT). We present two new abstractive summarization datasets in the domain of newswire. We also introduce a parallel Catalan-English corpus, paired with three different brand new test sets. Finally, we evaluate the data presented with competing state of the art models, and we develop baselines for these tasks using a newly created Catalan BART. We release the resulting resources of this work under open license to encourage the development of language technology in Catalan.

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is usually done via sequence-level knowledge distillation (Seq-KD) from a full-sentence neural machine translation (NMT) model. However, there is still a significant performance gap between NMT and SiMT. In this work, we propose to leverage monolingual data to improve SiMT, which trains a SiMT student on the combination of bilingual data and external monolingual data distilled by Seq-KD. Preliminary experiments on En-Zh and En-Ja news domain corpora demonstrate that monolingual data can significantly improve translation quality (e.g., +3.15 BLEU on En-Zh). Inspired by the behavior of human simultaneous interpreters, we propose a novel monolingual sampling strategy for SiMT, considering both chunk length and monotonicity. Experimental results show that our sampling strategy consistently outperforms the random sampling strategy (and other conventional typical NMT monolingual sampling strategies) by avoiding the key problem of SiMT -- hallucination, and has better scalability. We achieve +0.72 BLEU improvements on average against random sampling on En-Zh and En-Ja. Data and codes can be found at https://github.com/hexuandeng/Mono4SiMT.

Sequential recommendation aims to model dynamic user behavior from historical interactions. Existing methods rely on either explicit item IDs or general textual features for sequence modeling to understand user preferences. While promising, these approaches still struggle to model cold-start items or transfer knowledge to new datasets. In this paper, we propose to model user preferences and item features as language representations that can be generalized to new items and datasets. To this end, we present a novel framework, named Recformer, which effectively learns language representations for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we propose to formulate an item as a "sentence" (word sequence) by flattening item key-value attributes described by text so that an item sequence for a user becomes a sequence of sentences. For recommendation, Recformer is trained to understand the "sentence" sequence and retrieve the next "sentence". To encode item sequences, we design a bi-directional Transformer similar to the model Longformer but with different embedding layers for sequential recommendation. For effective representation learning, we propose novel pretraining and finetuning methods which combine language understanding and recommendation tasks. Therefore, Recformer can effectively recommend the next item based on language representations. Extensive experiments conducted on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Recformer for sequential recommendation, especially in low-resource and cold-start settings.

In this paper, we present Neural Phrase-based Machine Translation (NPMT). Our method explicitly models the phrase structures in output sequences using Sleep-WAke Networks (SWAN), a recently proposed segmentation-based sequence modeling method. To mitigate the monotonic alignment requirement of SWAN, we introduce a new layer to perform (soft) local reordering of input sequences. Different from existing neural machine translation (NMT) approaches, NPMT does not use attention-based decoding mechanisms. Instead, it directly outputs phrases in a sequential order and can decode in linear time. Our experiments show that NPMT achieves superior performances on IWSLT 2014 German-English/English-German and IWSLT 2015 English-Vietnamese machine translation tasks compared with strong NMT baselines. We also observe that our method produces meaningful phrases in output languages.

Data availability limits the scope of any given task. In machine translation, historical models were incapable of handling longer contexts, so the lack of document-level datasets was less noticeable. Now, despite the emergence of long-sequence methods, we remain within a sentence-level paradigm and without data to adequately approach context-aware machine translation. Most large-scale datasets have been processed through a pipeline that discards document-level metadata. In this work, we reconstruct document-level information for three (ParaCrawl, News Commentary, and Europarl) large datasets in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (paired with English). We then introduce a document-level filtering technique as an alternative to traditional bitext filtering. We present this filtering with analysis to show that this method prefers context-consistent translations rather than those that may have been sentence-level machine translated. Last we train models on these longer contexts and demonstrate improvement in document-level translation without degradation of sentence-level translation. We release our dataset, ParaDocs, and resulting models as a resource to the community.

We introduce MARGE, a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model learned with an unsupervised multi-lingual multi-document paraphrasing objective. MARGE provides an alternative to the dominant masked language modeling paradigm, where we self-supervise the reconstruction of target text by retrieving a set of related texts (in many languages) and conditioning on them to maximize the likelihood of generating the original. We show it is possible to jointly learn to do retrieval and reconstruction, given only a random initialization. The objective noisily captures aspects of paraphrase, translation, multi-document summarization, and information retrieval, allowing for strong zero-shot performance on several tasks. For example, with no additional task-specific training we achieve BLEU scores of up to 35.8 for document translation. We further show that fine-tuning gives strong performance on a range of discriminative and generative tasks in many languages, making MARGE the most generally applicable pre-training method to date.

Reordering is a preprocessing stage for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system where the words of the source sentence are reordered as per the syntax of the target language. We are proposing a rich set of rules for better reordering. The idea is to facilitate the training process by better alignments and parallel phrase extraction for a phrase-based SMT system. Reordering also helps the decoding process and hence improving the machine translation quality. We have observed significant improvements in the translation quality by using our approach over the baseline SMT. We have used BLEU, NIST, multi-reference word error rate, multi-reference position independent error rate for judging the improvements. We have exploited open source SMT toolkit MOSES to develop the system.

This project aims to investigate a novel sequence generation method inspired by the AlphaGo paradigm, adapting it for use with large language models (LLMs). The proposed approach involves creating search trees of different possible completions and evaluating these completions based on model confidence. By considering various paths in the search tree and scoring them according to the model's confidence in each completion, we can generate diverse and high-quality sequences. This research explores the implementation of this paradigm by using confidence as a proxy for response quality akin to beam search vijayakumar2016diverse. The primary goal of this paper is to outline the paradigm and demonstrate its potential, rather than focusing on achieving perfect results. The paper will outline the reasons why we believe this paradigm has the potential to improve LLMs in the following manners: 1) increase output quality, 2) decrease errors, 3) eliminate or reduce the compound error problems, 4) generate diverse and creative completions, 5) allow for iterative problem-solving, and 6) self-training. We expect this approach to yield a set of diverse and coherent sequences, offering insights into balancing exploration and exploitation in sequence generation. Potential applications include creative text generation tasks, such as storytelling and content creation, as well as other natural language processing domains, like machine translation and automated summarization. The goal is that the model will be far more effective as it will be able to consider many possible variations allowing it to find the ideal completion. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of effective search strategies in sequence generation and their impact on generating high-quality, varied textual outputs.

Understanding procedural natural language (e.g., step-by-step instructions) is a crucial step to execution and planning. However, while there are ample corpora and downstream tasks available in English, the field lacks such resources for most languages. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Turkish procedural texts. We first expand the number of tutorials in Turkish wikiHow from 2,000 to 52,000 using automated translation tools, where the translation quality and loyalty to the original meaning are validated by a team of experts on a random set. Then, we generate several downstream tasks on the corpus, such as linking actions, goal inference, and summarization. To tackle these tasks, we implement strong baseline models via fine-tuning large language-specific models such as TR-BART and BERTurk, as well as multilingual models such as mBART, mT5, and XLM. We find that language-specific models consistently outperform their multilingual models by a significant margin across most procedural language understanding (PLU) tasks. We release our corpus, downstream tasks and the baseline models with https://github.com/ GGLAB-KU/turkish-plu.

Sequential Recommendation (SR) task involves predicting the next item a user is likely to interact with, given their past interactions. The SR models examine the sequence of a user's actions to discern more complex behavioral patterns and temporal dynamics. Recent research demonstrates the great impact of LLMs on sequential recommendation systems, either viewing sequential recommendation as language modeling or serving as the backbone for user representation. Although these methods deliver outstanding performance, there is scant evidence of the necessity of a large language model and how large the language model is needed, especially in the sequential recommendation scene. Meanwhile, due to the huge size of LLMs, it is inefficient and impractical to apply a LLM-based model in real-world platforms that often need to process billions of traffic logs daily. In this paper, we explore the influence of LLMs' depth by conducting extensive experiments on large-scale industry datasets. Surprisingly, our motivational experiments reveal that most intermediate layers of LLMs are redundant, indicating that pruning the remaining layers can still maintain strong performance. Motivated by this insight, we empower small language models for SR, namely SLMRec, which adopt a simple yet effective knowledge distillation method. Moreover, SLMRec is orthogonal to other post-training efficiency techniques, such as quantization and pruning, so that they can be leveraged in combination. Comprehensive experimental results illustrate that the proposed SLMRec model attains the best performance using only 13% of the parameters found in LLM-based recommendation models while simultaneously achieving up to 6.6x and 8.0x speedups in training and inference time costs, respectively. Besides, we provide a theoretical justification for why small language models can perform comparably to large language models in SR.

We release our synthetic parallel paraphrase corpus across 17 languages: Arabic, Catalan, Czech, German, English, Spanish, Estonian, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Our method relies only on monolingual data and a neural machine translation system to generate paraphrases, hence simple to apply. We generate multiple translation samples using beam search and choose the most lexically diverse pair according to their sentence BLEU. We compare our generated corpus with the ParaBank2. According to our evaluation, our synthetic paraphrase pairs are semantically similar and lexically diverse.

We introduce Hibiki, a decoder-only model for simultaneous speech translation. Hibiki leverages a multistream language model to synchronously process source and target speech, and jointly produces text and audio tokens to perform speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation. We furthermore address the fundamental challenge of simultaneous interpretation, which unlike its consecutive counterpart, where one waits for the end of the source utterance to start translating, adapts its flow to accumulate just enough context to produce a correct translation in real-time, chunk by chunk. To do so, we introduce a weakly-supervised method that leverages the perplexity of an off-the-shelf text translation system to identify optimal delays on a per-word basis and create aligned synthetic data. After supervised training, Hibiki performs adaptive, simultaneous speech translation with vanilla temperature sampling. On a French-English simultaneous speech translation task, Hibiki demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in translation quality, speaker fidelity and naturalness. Moreover, the simplicity of its inference process makes it compatible with batched translation and even real-time on-device deployment. We provide examples as well as models and inference code.

Simultaneous neural machine translation(SNMT) models start emitting the target sequence before they have processed the source sequence. The recent adaptive policies for SNMT use monotonic attention to perform read/write decisions based on the partial source and target sequences. The lack of sufficient information might cause the monotonic attention to take poor read/write decisions, which in turn negatively affects the performance of the SNMT model. On the other hand, human translators make better read/write decisions since they can anticipate the immediate future words using linguistic information and domain knowledge.Motivated by human translators, in this work, we propose a framework to aid monotonic attention with an external language model to improve its decisions.We conduct experiments on the MuST-C English-German and English-French speech-to-text translation tasks to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.The proposed SNMT method improves the quality-latency trade-off over the state-of-the-art monotonic multihead attention.

Many machine learning tasks can be expressed as the transformation---or transduction---of input sequences into output sequences: speech recognition, machine translation, protein secondary structure prediction and text-to-speech to name but a few. One of the key challenges in sequence transduction is learning to represent both the input and output sequences in a way that is invariant to sequential distortions such as shrinking, stretching and translating. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a powerful sequence learning architecture that has proven capable of learning such representations. However RNNs traditionally require a pre-defined alignment between the input and output sequences to perform transduction. This is a severe limitation since finding the alignment is the most difficult aspect of many sequence transduction problems. Indeed, even determining the length of the output sequence is often challenging. This paper introduces an end-to-end, probabilistic sequence transduction system, based entirely on RNNs, that is in principle able to transform any input sequence into any finite, discrete output sequence. Experimental results for phoneme recognition are provided on the TIMIT speech corpus.

The availability of parallel texts is crucial to the performance of machine translation models. However, most of the world's languages face the predominant challenge of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose strategies to synthesize parallel data relying on morpho-syntactic information and using bilingual lexicons along with a small amount of seed parallel data. Our methodology adheres to a realistic scenario backed by the small parallel seed data. It is linguistically informed, as it aims to create augmented data that is more likely to be grammatically correct. We analyze how our synthetic data can be combined with raw parallel data and demonstrate a consistent improvement in performance in our experiments on 14 languages (28 English <-> X pairs) ranging from well- to very low-resource ones. Our method leads to improvements even when using only five seed sentences and a bilingual lexicon.

Simultaneous machine translation consists in starting output generation before the entire input sequence is available. Wait-k decoders offer a simple but efficient approach for this problem. They first read k source tokens, after which they alternate between producing a target token and reading another source token. We investigate the behavior of wait-k decoding in low resource settings for spoken corpora using IWSLT datasets. We improve training of these models using unidirectional encoders, and training across multiple values of k. Experiments with Transformer and 2D-convolutional architectures show that our wait-k models generalize well across a wide range of latency levels. We also show that the 2D-convolution architecture is competitive with Transformers for simultaneous translation of spoken language.

Research on Machine Translation (MT) has achieved important breakthroughs in several areas. While there is much more to be done in order to build on this success, we believe that the language industry needs better ways to take full advantage of current achievements. Due to a combination of factors, including time, resources, and skills, businesses tend to apply pragmatism into their AI workflows. Hence, they concentrate more on outcomes, e.g. delivery, shipping, releases, and features, and adopt high-level working production solutions, where possible. Among the features thought to be helpful for translators are sentence-level and word-level translation auto-suggestion and auto-completion. Suggesting alternatives can inspire translators and limit their need to refer to external resources, which hopefully boosts their productivity. This work describes our submissions to WMT's shared task on word-level auto-completion, for the Chinese-to-English, English-to-Chinese, German-to-English, and English-to-German language directions. We investigate the possibility of using pre-trained models and out-of-the-box features from available libraries. We employ random sampling to generate diverse alternatives, which reveals good results. Furthermore, we introduce our open-source API, based on CTranslate2, to serve translations, auto-suggestions, and auto-completions.

Since long, research on machine translation has been ongoing. Still, we do not get good translations from MT engines so developed. Manual ranking of these outputs tends to be very time consuming and expensive. Identifying which one is better or worse than the others is a very taxing task. In this paper, we show an approach which can provide automatic ranks to MT outputs (translations) taken from different MT Engines and which is based on N-gram approximations. We provide a solution where no human intervention is required for ranking systems. Further we also show the evaluations of our results which show equivalent results as that of human ranking.

Currently, there is no usable machine translation system for Nko, a language spoken by tens of millions of people across multiple West African countries, which holds significant cultural and educational value. To address this issue, we present a set of tools, resources, and baseline results aimed towards the development of usable machine translation systems for Nko and other languages that do not currently have sufficiently large parallel text corpora available. (1) Friaparallelel: A novel collaborative parallel text curation software that incorporates quality control through copyedit-based workflows. (2) Expansion of the FLoRes-200 and NLLB-Seed corpora with 2,009 and 6,193 high-quality Nko translations in parallel with 204 and 40 other languages. (3) nicolingua-0005: A collection of trilingual and bilingual corpora with 130,850 parallel segments and monolingual corpora containing over 3 million Nko words. (4) Baseline bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation results with the best model scoring 30.83 English-Nko chrF++ on FLoRes-devtest.

Prompting has recently been shown as a promising approach for applying pre-trained language models to perform downstream tasks. We present Multi-Stage Prompting (MSP), a simple and automatic approach for leveraging pre-trained language models to translation tasks. To better mitigate the discrepancy between pre-training and translation, MSP divides the translation process via pre-trained language models into multiple separate stages: the encoding stage, the re-encoding stage, and the decoding stage. During each stage, we independently apply different continuous prompts for allowing pre-trained language models better shift to translation tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on three translation tasks. Experiments show that our method can significantly improve the translation performance of pre-trained language models.

The scope of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) has recently broadened beyond traditional Speech Translation (ST) to encompass a wider array of tasks, including Speech Question Answering and Summarization. This shift is partly driven by the growing capabilities of modern systems, particularly with the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we present the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's submissions for the Offline ST and Instruction Following (IF) tracks, where we leverage LLMs to enhance performance across all tasks. For the Offline ST track, we propose a pipeline that employs multiple automatic speech recognition systems, whose outputs are fused using an LLM with document-level context. This is followed by a two-step translation process, incorporating additional refinement step to improve translation quality. For the IF track, we develop an end-to-end model that integrates a speech encoder with an LLM to perform a wide range of instruction-following tasks. We complement it with a final document-level refinement stage to further enhance output quality by using contextual information.

The ability to generate natural language sequences from source code snippets has a variety of applications such as code summarization, documentation, and retrieval. Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, adopted from neural machine translation (NMT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on these tasks by treating source code as a sequence of tokens. We present {scriptsize CODE2SEQ}: an alternative approach that leverages the syntactic structure of programming languages to better encode source code. Our model represents a code snippet as the set of compositional paths in its abstract syntax tree (AST) and uses attention to select the relevant paths while decoding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for two tasks, two programming languages, and four datasets of up to 16M examples. Our model significantly outperforms previous models that were specifically designed for programming languages, as well as state-of-the-art NMT models. An interactive online demo of our model is available at http://code2seq.org. Our code, data and trained models are available at http://github.com/tech-srl/code2seq.

If you had an AI Whale-to-English translator, how could you validate whether or not it is working? Does one need to interact with the animals or rely on grounded observations such as temperature? We provide theoretical and proof-of-concept experimental evidence suggesting that interaction and even observations may not be necessary for sufficiently complex languages. One may be able to evaluate translators solely by their English outputs, offering potential advantages in terms of safety, ethics, and cost. This is an instance of machine translation quality evaluation (MTQE) without any reference translations available. A key challenge is identifying ``hallucinations,'' false translations which may appear fluent and plausible. We propose using segment-by-segment translation together with the classic NLP shuffle test to evaluate translators. The idea is to translate animal communication, turn by turn, and evaluate how often the resulting translations make more sense in order than permuted. Proof-of-concept experiments on data-scarce human languages and constructed languages demonstrate the potential utility of this evaluation methodology. These human-language experiments serve solely to validate our reference-free metric under data scarcity. It is found to correlate highly with a standard evaluation based on reference translations, which are available in our experiments. We also perform a theoretical analysis suggesting that interaction may not be necessary nor efficient in the early stages of learning to translate.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in multilingual machine translation, sometimes even outperforming traditional neural systems. However, previous research has highlighted the challenges of using LLMs, particularly with prompt engineering, for low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce Fragment-Shot Prompting, a novel in-context learning method that segments input and retrieves translation examples based on syntactic coverage, along with Pivoted Fragment-Shot, an extension that enables translation without direct parallel data. We evaluate these methods using GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, o1-mini, LLaMA-3.3, and DeepSeek-R1 for translation between Italian and two Ladin variants, revealing three key findings: (1) Fragment-Shot Prompting is effective for translating into and between the studied low-resource languages, with syntactic coverage positively correlating with translation quality; (2) Models with stronger reasoning abilities make more effective use of retrieved knowledge, generally produce better translations, and enable Pivoted Fragment-Shot to significantly improve translation quality between the Ladin variants; and (3) prompt engineering offers limited, if any, improvements when translating from a low-resource to a high-resource language, where zero-shot prompting already yields satisfactory results. We publicly release our code and the retrieval corpora.

Machine translation has recently achieved impressive performance thanks to recent advances in deep learning and the availability of large-scale parallel corpora. There have been numerous attempts to extend these successes to low-resource language pairs, yet requiring tens of thousands of parallel sentences. In this work, we take this research direction to the extreme and investigate whether it is possible to learn to translate even without any parallel data. We propose a model that takes sentences from monolingual corpora in two different languages and maps them into the same latent space. By learning to reconstruct in both languages from this shared feature space, the model effectively learns to translate without using any labeled data. We demonstrate our model on two widely used datasets and two language pairs, reporting BLEU scores of 32.8 and 15.1 on the Multi30k and WMT English-French datasets, without using even a single parallel sentence at training time.

Sequence-to-sequence models are commonly trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). However, standard MLE training considers a word-level objective, predicting the next word given the previous ground-truth partial sentence. This procedure focuses on modeling local syntactic patterns, and may fail to capture long-range semantic structure. We present a novel solution to alleviate these issues. Our approach imposes global sequence-level guidance via new supervision based on optimal transport, enabling the overall characterization and preservation of semantic features. We further show that this method can be understood as a Wasserstein gradient flow trying to match our model to the ground truth sequence distribution. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the utility of the proposed approach, showing consistent improvements over a wide variety of NLP tasks, including machine translation, abstractive text summarization, and image captioning.

We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.

This paper introduces AFRIDOC-MT, a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages: Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Yor\`ub\'a, and Zulu. The dataset comprises 334 health and 271 information technology news documents, all human-translated from English to these languages. We conduct document-level translation benchmark experiments by evaluating neural machine translation (NMT) models and large language models (LLMs) for translations between English and these languages, at both the sentence and pseudo-document levels. These outputs are realigned to form complete documents for evaluation. Our results indicate that NLLB-200 achieved the best average performance among the standard NMT models, while GPT-4o outperformed general-purpose LLMs. Fine-tuning selected models led to substantial performance gains, but models trained on sentences struggled to generalize effectively to longer documents. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that some LLMs exhibit issues such as under-generation, repetition of words or phrases, and off-target translations, especially for African languages.

In machine translation, a common problem is that the translation of certain words even if translated can cause incomprehension of the target language audience due to different cultural backgrounds. A solution to solve this problem is to add explanations for these words. In a first step, we therefore need to identify these words or phrases. In this work we explore techniques to extract example explanations from a parallel corpus. However, the sparsity of sentences containing words that need to be explained makes building the training dataset extremely difficult. In this work, we propose a semi-automatic technique to extract these explanations from a large parallel corpus. Experiments on English->German language pair show that our method is able to extract sentence so that more than 10% of the sentences contain explanation, while only 1.9% of the original sentences contain explanations. In addition, experiments on English->French and English->Chinese language pairs also show similar conclusions. This is therefore an essential first automatic step to create a explanation dataset. Furthermore we show that the technique is robust for all three language pairs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x ChrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.

Multilingual speech translation (ST) in the medical domain enhances patient care by enabling efficient communication across language barriers, alleviating specialized workforce shortages, and facilitating improved diagnosis and treatment, particularly during pandemics. In this work, we present the first systematic study on medical ST, to our best knowledge, by releasing MultiMed-ST, a large-scale ST dataset for the medical domain, spanning all translation directions in five languages: Vietnamese, English, German, French, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, together with the models. With 290,000 samples, our dataset is the largest medical machine translation (MT) dataset and the largest many-to-many multilingual ST among all domains. Secondly, we present the most extensive analysis study in ST research to date, including: empirical baselines, bilingual-multilingual comparative study, end-to-end vs. cascaded comparative study, task-specific vs. multi-task sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) comparative study, code-switch analysis, and quantitative-qualitative error analysis. All code, data, and models are available online: https://github.com/leduckhai/MultiMed-ST.

Recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have focused on modern languages and achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to ancient texts and related tasks. Classical Chinese first came to Japan approximately 2,000 years ago. It was gradually adapted to a Japanese form called Kanbun-Kundoku (Kanbun) in Japanese reading and translating methods, which has significantly impacted Japanese literature. However, compared to the rich resources for ancient texts in mainland China, Kanbun resources remain scarce in Japan. To solve this problem, we construct the first Classical-Chinese-to-Kanbun dataset in the world. Furthermore, we introduce two tasks, character reordering and machine translation, both of which play a significant role in Kanbun comprehension. We also test the current language models on these tasks and discuss the best evaluation method by comparing the results with human scores. We release our code and dataset on GitHub.

In this paper, we introduce How2, a multimodal collection of instructional videos with English subtitles and crowdsourced Portuguese translations. We also present integrated sequence-to-sequence baselines for machine translation, automatic speech recognition, spoken language translation, and multimodal summarization. By making available data and code for several multimodal natural language tasks, we hope to stimulate more research on these and similar challenges, to obtain a deeper understanding of multimodality in language processing.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown continuously improving multilingual capabilities, and even small-scale open-source models have demonstrated rapid performance enhancement. In this paper, we systematically explore the abilities of open LLMs with less than ten billion parameters to handle multilingual machine translation (MT) tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on six popular LLMs and find that models like Gemma2-9B exhibit impressive multilingual translation capabilities. We then introduce the Parallel-First Monolingual-Second (PFMS) data mixing strategy in the continual pretraining stage to further enhance the MT performance and present GemmaX2-28, a 9B model achieving top-tier multilingual translation performance across 28 languages. Specifically, GemmaX2-28 consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as TowerInstruct and XALMA and achieves competitive performance with Google Translate and GPT-4-turbo.

We describe PARANMT-50M, a dataset of more than 50 million English-English sentential paraphrase pairs. We generated the pairs automatically by using neural machine translation to translate the non-English side of a large parallel corpus, following Wieting et al. (2017). Our hope is that ParaNMT-50M can be a valuable resource for paraphrase generation and can provide a rich source of semantic knowledge to improve downstream natural language understanding tasks. To show its utility, we use ParaNMT-50M to train paraphrastic sentence embeddings that outperform all supervised systems on every SemEval semantic textual similarity competition, in addition to showing how it can be used for paraphrase generation.

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. Machine Translation (MT) has been shown to benefit from in-context examples, in particular when they are semantically similar to the sentence to translate. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-based translation paradigm, compositional translation, to replace naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. An LLM is used to decompose a sentence into simpler phrases, and then to translate each phrase with the help of retrieved demonstrations. Finally, the LLM is prompted to translate the initial sentence with the help of the self-generated phrase-translation pairs. Our intuition is that this approach should improve translation because these shorter phrases should be intrinsically easier to translate and easier to match with relevant examples. This is especially beneficial in low-resource scenarios, and more generally whenever the selection pool is small or out of domain. We show that compositional translation boosts LLM translation performance on a wide range of popular MT benchmarks, including FLORES 200, NTREX 128 and TICO-19. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/compositional-translation

The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT22 shared task on code-mixed translation. This consists of two subtasks: i) generating code-mixed Hindi/English (Hinglish) text generation from parallel Hindi and English sentences and ii) machine translation from Hinglish to English. As both subtasks are considered low-resource, we focused our efforts on careful data generation and curation, especially the use of backtranslation from monolingual resources. For subtask 1 we explored the effects of constrained decoding on English and transliterated subwords in order to produce Hinglish. For subtask 2, we investigated different pretraining techniques, namely comparing simple initialisation from existing machine translation models and aligned augmentation. For both subtasks, we found that our baseline systems worked best. Our systems for both subtasks were one of the overall top-performing submissions.

Machine translation (MT) has almost achieved human parity at sentence-level translation. In response, the MT community has, in part, shifted its focus to document-level translation. However, the development of document-level MT systems is hampered by the lack of parallel document corpora. This paper describes BWB, a large parallel corpus first introduced in Jiang et al. (2022), along with an annotated test set. The BWB corpus consists of Chinese novels translated by experts into English, and the annotated test set is designed to probe the ability of machine translation systems to model various discourse phenomena. Our resource is freely available, and we hope it will serve as a guide and inspiration for more work in document-level machine translation.

Terminology correctness is important in the downstream application of machine translation, and a prevalent way to ensure this is to inject terminology constraints into a translation system. In our submission to the WMT 2023 terminology translation task, we adopt a translate-then-refine approach which can be domain-independent and requires minimal manual efforts. We annotate random source words with pseudo-terminology translations obtained from word alignment to first train a terminology-aware model. Further, we explore two post-processing methods. First, we use an alignment process to discover whether a terminology constraint has been violated, and if so, we re-decode with the violating word negatively constrained. Alternatively, we leverage a large language model to refine a hypothesis by providing it with terminology constraints. Results show that our terminology-aware model learns to incorporate terminologies effectively, and the large language model refinement process can further improve terminology recall.

Paraphrases are texts that convey the same meaning while using different words or sentence structures. It can be used as an automatic data augmentation tool for many Natural Language Processing tasks, especially when dealing with low-resource languages, where data shortage is a significant problem. To generate a paraphrase in multilingual settings, previous studies have leveraged the knowledge from the machine translation field, i.e., forming a paraphrase through zero-shot machine translation in the same language. Despite good performance on human evaluation, those methods still require parallel translation datasets, thus making them inapplicable to languages that do not have parallel corpora. To mitigate that problem, we proposed the first unsupervised multilingual paraphrasing model, LAMPAT (Low-rank Adaptation for Multilingual Paraphrasing using Adversarial Training), by which monolingual dataset is sufficient enough to generate a human-like and diverse sentence. Throughout the experiments, we found out that our method not only works well for English but can generalize on unseen languages as well. Data and code are available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LAMPAT.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recent research shows that the moderately-sized LLMs often outperform their larger counterparts after task-specific fine-tuning. In this work, we delve into the process of adapting LLMs to specialize in document-level machine translation (DocMT) for a specific language pair. Firstly, we explore how prompt strategies affect downstream translation performance. Then, we conduct extensive experiments with two fine-tuning methods, three LLM backbones, and 18 translation tasks across nine language pairs. Our findings indicate that in some cases, these specialized models even surpass GPT-4 in translation performance, while they still significantly suffer from the off-target translation issue in others, even if they are exclusively fine-tuned on bilingual parallel documents. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis of these LLMs tailored for DocMT, exploring aspects such as translation errors, discourse phenomena, training strategy, the scaling law of parallel documents, additional evaluation on recent test sets, and zero-shot crosslingual transfer. Our findings not only shed light on the strengths and limitations of LLM-based DocMT models but also provide a foundation for future research.

To build large language models for Ukrainian we need to expand our corpora with large amounts of new algorithmic tasks expressed in natural language. Examples of task performance expressed in English are abundant, so with a high-quality translation system our community will be enabled to curate datasets faster. To aid this goal, we introduce a recipe to build a translation system using supervised finetuning of a large pretrained language model with a noisy parallel dataset of 3M pairs of Ukrainian and English sentences followed by a second phase of training using 17K examples selected by k-fold perplexity filtering on another dataset of higher quality. Our decoder-only model named Dragoman beats performance of previous state of the art encoder-decoder models on the FLORES devtest set.

The primary objective of our work is to build a large-scale English-Thai dataset for machine translation. We construct an English-Thai machine translation dataset with over 1 million segment pairs, curated from various sources, namely news, Wikipedia articles, SMS messages, task-based dialogs, web-crawled data and government documents. Methodology for gathering data, building parallel texts and removing noisy sentence pairs are presented in a reproducible manner. We train machine translation models based on this dataset. Our models' performance are comparable to that of Google Translation API (as of May 2020) for Thai-English and outperform Google when the Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) is included in the training data for both Thai-English and English-Thai translation. The dataset, pre-trained models, and source code to reproduce our work are available for public use.

This paper presents BOUQuET, a multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark, and its broader collaborative extension initiative. This dataset is handcrafted in non-English languages first, each of these source languages being represented among the 23 languages commonly used by half of the world's population and therefore having the potential to serve as pivot languages that will enable more accurate translations. The dataset is specially designed to avoid contamination and be multicentric, so as to enforce representation of multilingual language features. In addition, the dataset goes beyond the sentence level, as it is organized in paragraphs of various lengths. Compared with related machine translation (MT) datasets, we show that BOUQuET has a broader representation of domains while simplifying the translation task for non-experts. Therefore, BOUQuET is specially suitable for the open initiative and call for translation participation that we are launching to extend it to a multi-way parallel corpus to any written language.

Research on prompting has shown excellent performance with little or even no supervised training across many tasks. However, prompting for machine translation is still under-explored in the literature. We fill this gap by offering a systematic study on prompting strategies for translation, examining various factors for prompt template and demonstration example selection. We further explore the use of monolingual data and the feasibility of cross-lingual, cross-domain, and sentence-to-document transfer learning in prompting. Extensive experiments with GLM-130B (Zeng et al., 2022) as the testbed show that 1) the number and the quality of prompt examples matter, where using suboptimal examples degenerates translation; 2) several features of prompt examples, such as semantic similarity, show significant Spearman correlation with their prompting performance; yet, none of the correlations are strong enough; 3) using pseudo parallel prompt examples constructed from monolingual data via zero-shot prompting could improve translation; and 4) improved performance is achievable by transferring knowledge from prompt examples selected in other settings. We finally provide an analysis on the model outputs and discuss several problems that prompting still suffers from.

Simultaneous translation systems start producing the output while processing the partial source sentence in the incoming input stream. These systems need to decide when to read more input and when to write the output. These decisions depend on the structure of source/target language and the information contained in the partial input sequence. Hence, read/write decision policy remains the same across different input modalities, i.e., speech and text. This motivates us to leverage the text transcripts corresponding to the speech input for improving simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST). We propose Decision Attentive Regularization (DAR) to improve the decision policy of SimulST systems by using the simultaneous text-to-text translation (SimulMT) task. We also extend several techniques from the offline speech translation domain to explore the role of SimulMT task in improving SimulST performance. Overall, we achieve 34.66% / 4.5 BLEU improvement over the baseline model across different latency regimes for the MuST-C English-German (EnDe) SimulST task.

Large language models have shown surprising performances in understanding instructions and performing natural language tasks. In this paper, we propose iterative translation refinement to leverage the power of large language models for more natural translation and post-editing. We show that by simply involving a large language model in an iterative process, the output quality improves beyond mere translation. Extensive test scenarios with GPT-3.5 reveal that although iterations reduce string-based metric scores, neural metrics indicate comparable if not improved translation quality. Further, human evaluations demonstrate that our method effectively reduces translationese compared to initial GPT translations and even human references, especially for into-English directions. Ablation studies underscore the importance of anchoring the refinement process to the source input and a reasonable initial translation.

Sequential recommendation (SR) systems have evolved significantly over the past decade, transitioning from traditional collaborative filtering to deep learning approaches and, more recently, to large language models (LLMs). While the adoption of LLMs has driven substantial advancements, these models inherently lack collaborative filtering information, relying primarily on textual content data neglecting other modalities and thus failing to achieve optimal recommendation performance. To address this limitation, we propose Molar, a Multimodal large language sequential recommendation framework that integrates multiple content modalities with ID information to capture collaborative signals effectively. Molar employs an MLLM to generate unified item representations from both textual and non-textual data, facilitating comprehensive multimodal modeling and enriching item embeddings. Additionally, it incorporates collaborative filtering signals through a post-alignment mechanism, which aligns user representations from content-based and ID-based models, ensuring precise personalization and robust performance. By seamlessly combining multimodal content with collaborative filtering insights, Molar captures both user interests and contextual semantics, leading to superior recommendation accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that Molar significantly outperforms traditional and LLM-based baselines, highlighting its strength in utilizing multimodal data and collaborative signals for sequential recommendation tasks. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Molar-8B06/.

In this work, we conduct an experiment using state-of-the-art LLMs to translate MiniF2F into Rocq. The translation task focuses on generating a Rocq theorem based on three sources: a natural language description, the Lean formalization, and the Isabelle formalization. We conducted our experiment in 3 stages of increasing complexity, from basic one-shot prompting to multi-turn conversations that incorporate feedback from unsuccessful attempts. At each stage, we perform multiple rounds of translation using increasingly advanced models: GPT-4o mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, o1 mini, and o1. We successfully translated 478 out of 488 theorems. The dataset is opensource: https://github.com/LLM4Rocq/miniF2F-rocq.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in sentence-level machine translation, but scaling to document-level translation remains challenging, particularly in modeling long-range dependencies and discourse phenomena across sentences and paragraphs. In this work, we propose a method to improve LLM-based long-document translation through targeted fine-tuning on high-quality document-level data, which we curate and introduce as DocBlocks. Our approach supports multiple translation paradigms, including direct document-to-document and chunk-level translation, by integrating instructions both with and without surrounding context. This enables models to better capture cross-sentence dependencies while maintaining strong sentence-level translation performance. Experimental results show that incorporating multiple translation paradigms improves document-level translation quality and inference speed compared to prompting and agent-based methods.

We consider the problem of translating high-level textual descriptions to formal representations in technical documentation as part of an effort to model the meaning of such documentation. We focus specifically on the problem of learning translational correspondences between text descriptions and grounded representations in the target documentation, such as formal representation of functions or code templates. Our approach exploits the parallel nature of such documentation, or the tight coupling between high-level text and the low-level representations we aim to learn. Data is collected by mining technical documents for such parallel text-representation pairs, which we use to train a simple semantic parsing model. We report new baseline results on sixteen novel datasets, including the standard library documentation for nine popular programming languages across seven natural languages, and a small collection of Unix utility manuals.

A dense passage retrieval system can serve as the initial stages of information retrieval, selecting the most relevant text passages for downstream tasks. In this work we conducted experiments with the goal of finding how much the quality of a multilingual retrieval could be degraded if the query part of a dual encoder is tuned on an English-only dataset (assuming scarcity of cross-lingual samples for the targeted domain or task). Specifically, starting with a high quality multilingual embedding model, we observe that an English-only tuning may not only preserve the original quality of the multilingual retrieval, but even improve it.

With the increased audiovisualisation of communication, the need for live subtitles in multilingual events is more relevant than ever. In an attempt to automatise the process, we aim at exploring the feasibility of simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) for live subtitling. However, the word-for-word rate of generation of SimulST systems is not optimal for displaying the subtitles in a comprehensible and readable way. In this work, we adapt SimulST systems to predict subtitle breaks along with the translation. We then propose a display mode that exploits the predicted break structure by presenting the subtitles in scrolling lines. We compare our proposed mode with a display 1) word-for-word and 2) in blocks, in terms of reading speed and delay. Experiments on three language pairs (enrightarrowit, de, fr) show that scrolling lines is the only mode achieving an acceptable reading speed while keeping delay close to a 4-second threshold. We argue that simultaneous translation for readable live subtitles still faces challenges, the main one being poor translation quality, and propose directions for steering future research.

This paper presents a study on strategies to enhance the translation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of machine translation (MT) tasks. The paper proposes a novel paradigm consisting of three stages: Secondary Pre-training using Extensive Monolingual Data, Continual Pre-training with Interlinear Text Format Documents, and Leveraging Source-Language Consistent Instruction for Supervised Fine-Tuning. Previous research on LLMs focused on various strategies for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but their effectiveness has been limited. While traditional machine translation approaches rely on vast amounts of parallel bilingual data, our paradigm highlights the importance of using smaller sets of high-quality bilingual data. We argue that the focus should be on augmenting LLMs' cross-lingual alignment abilities during pre-training rather than solely relying on extensive bilingual data during SFT. Experimental results conducted using the Llama2 model, particularly on Chinese-Llama2 after monolingual augmentation, demonstrate the improved translation capabilities of LLMs. A significant contribution of our approach lies in Stage2: Continual Pre-training with Interlinear Text Format Documents, which requires less than 1B training data, making our method highly efficient. Additionally, in Stage3, we observed that setting instructions consistent with the source language benefits the supervised fine-tuning process. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous work and achieves superior performance compared to models such as NLLB-54B and GPT3.5-text-davinci-003, despite having a significantly smaller parameter count of only 7B or 13B. This achievement establishes our method as a pioneering strategy in the field of machine translation.

Sequences have become first class citizens in supervised learning thanks to the resurgence of recurrent neural networks. Many complex tasks that require mapping from or to a sequence of observations can now be formulated with the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) framework which employs the chain rule to efficiently represent the joint probability of sequences. In many cases, however, variable sized inputs and/or outputs might not be naturally expressed as sequences. For instance, it is not clear how to input a set of numbers into a model where the task is to sort them; similarly, we do not know how to organize outputs when they correspond to random variables and the task is to model their unknown joint probability. In this paper, we first show using various examples that the order in which we organize input and/or output data matters significantly when learning an underlying model. We then discuss an extension of the seq2seq framework that goes beyond sequences and handles input sets in a principled way. In addition, we propose a loss which, by searching over possible orders during training, deals with the lack of structure of output sets. We show empirical evidence of our claims regarding ordering, and on the modifications to the seq2seq framework on benchmark language modeling and parsing tasks, as well as two artificial tasks -- sorting numbers and estimating the joint probability of unknown graphical models.

We present TransEvalnia, a prompting-based translation evaluation and ranking system that uses reasoning in performing its evaluations and ranking. This system presents fine-grained evaluations based on a subset of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (https://themqm.org/), returns an assessment of which translation it deems the best, and provides numerical scores for the various dimensions and for the overall translation. We show that TransEvalnia performs as well as or better than the state-of-the-art MT-Ranker (Moosa et al. 2024) on our own English-Japanese data as well as several language pairs from various WMT shared tasks. Using Anthropic's Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct as the evaluation LLMs, we show that the evaluations returned are deemed highly acceptable to human raters, and that the scores assigned to the translations by Sonnet, as well as other LLMs, correlate well with scores assigned by the human raters. We also note the sensitivity of our system -- as well as MT-Ranker -- to the order in which the translations are presented, and we propose methods to address this position bias. All data, including the system's evaluation and reasoning, human assessments, as well as code is released.

Machine Translation has made impressive progress in recent years offering close to human-level performance on many languages, but studies have primarily focused on high-resource languages with broad online presence and resources. With the help of growing Large Language Models, more and more low-resource languages achieve better results through the presence of other languages. However, studies have shown that not all low-resource languages can benefit from multilingual systems, especially those with insufficient training and evaluation data. In this paper, we revisit state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation techniques to develop automatic translation systems between German and Bavarian. We investigate conditions of low-resource languages such as data scarcity and parameter sensitivity and focus on refined solutions that combat low-resource difficulties and creative solutions such as harnessing language similarity. Our experiment entails applying Back-translation and Transfer Learning to automatically generate more training data and achieve higher translation performance. We demonstrate noisiness in the data and present our approach to carry out text preprocessing extensively. Evaluation was conducted using combined metrics: BLEU, chrF and TER. Statistical significance results with Bonferroni correction show surprisingly high baseline systems, and that Back-translation leads to significant improvement. Furthermore, we present a qualitative analysis of translation errors and system limitations.

We release S\={a}mayik, a dataset of around 53,000 parallel English-Sanskrit sentences, written in contemporary prose. Sanskrit is a classical language still in sustenance and has a rich documented heritage. However, due to the limited availability of digitized content, it still remains a low-resource language. Existing Sanskrit corpora, whether monolingual or bilingual, have predominantly focused on poetry and offer limited coverage of contemporary written materials. S\={a}mayik is curated from a diverse range of domains, including language instruction material, textual teaching pedagogy, and online tutorials, among others. It stands out as a unique resource that specifically caters to the contemporary usage of Sanskrit, with a primary emphasis on prose writing. Translation models trained on our dataset demonstrate statistically significant improvements when translating out-of-domain contemporary corpora, outperforming models trained on older classical-era poetry datasets. Finally, we also release benchmark models by adapting four multilingual pre-trained models, three of them have not been previously exposed to Sanskrit for translating between English and Sanskrit while one of them is multi-lingual pre-trained translation model including English and Sanskrit. The dataset and source code is present at https://github.com/ayushbits/saamayik.

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) significantly accelerates the inference process via predicting the entire target sequence. However, recent studies show that NAT is weak at learning high-mode of knowledge such as one-to-many translations. We argue that modes can be divided into various granularities which can be learned from easy to hard. In this study, we empirically show that NAT models are prone to learn fine-grained lower-mode knowledge, such as words and phrases, compared with sentences. Based on this observation, we propose progressive multi-granularity training for NAT. More specifically, to make the most of the training data, we break down the sentence-level examples into three types, i.e. words, phrases, sentences, and with the training goes, we progressively increase the granularities. Experiments on Romanian-English, English-German, Chinese-English, and Japanese-English demonstrate that our approach improves the phrase translation accuracy and model reordering ability, therefore resulting in better translation quality against strong NAT baselines. Also, we show that more deterministic fine-grained knowledge can further enhance performance.

Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (UNMT) focuses on improving NMT results under the assumption there is no human translated parallel data, yet little work has been done so far in highlighting its advantages compared to supervised methods and analyzing its output in aspects other than translation accuracy. We focus on three very diverse languages, French, Gujarati, and Kazakh, and train bilingual NMT models, to and from English, with various levels of supervision, in high- and low- resource setups, measure quality of the NMT output and compare the generated sequences' word order and semantic similarity to source and reference sentences. We also use Layer-wise Relevance Propagation to evaluate the source and target sentences' contribution to the result, expanding the findings of previous works to the UNMT paradigm.

Most existing sequence generation models produce outputs in one pass, usually left-to-right. However, this is in contrast with a more natural approach that humans use in generating content; iterative refinement and editing. Recent work has introduced edit-based models for various tasks (such as neural machine translation and text style transfer), but these generally model a single edit step. In this work, we propose modeling editing processes, modeling the whole process of iteratively generating sequences. We form a conceptual framework to describe the likelihood of multi-step edits, and describe neural models that can learn a generative model of sequences based on these multistep edits. We introduce baseline results and metrics on this task, finding that modeling editing processes improves performance on a variety of axes on both our proposed task and related downstream tasks compared to previous single-step models of edits.

Modeling attention in neural multi-source sequence-to-sequence learning remains a relatively unexplored area, despite its usefulness in tasks that incorporate multiple source languages or modalities. We propose two novel approaches to combine the outputs of attention mechanisms over each source sequence, flat and hierarchical. We compare the proposed methods with existing techniques and present results of systematic evaluation of those methods on the WMT16 Multimodal Translation and Automatic Post-editing tasks. We show that the proposed methods achieve competitive results on both tasks.

This paper presents a solution for the Multilingual Text Detoxification task in the PAN-2024 competition of the SmurfCat team. Using data augmentation through machine translation and a special filtering procedure, we collected an additional multilingual parallel dataset for text detoxification. Using the obtained data, we fine-tuned several multilingual sequence-to-sequence models, such as mT0 and Aya, on a text detoxification task. We applied the ORPO alignment technique to the final model. Our final model has only 3.7 billion parameters and achieves state-of-the-art results for the Ukrainian language and near state-of-the-art results for other languages. In the competition, our team achieved first place in the automated evaluation with a score of 0.52 and second place in the final human evaluation with a score of 0.74.

Detecting the translation direction of parallel text has applications for machine translation training and evaluation, but also has forensic applications such as resolving plagiarism or forgery allegations. In this work, we explore an unsupervised approach to translation direction detection based on the simple hypothesis that p(translation|original)>p(original|translation), motivated by the well-known simplification effect in translationese or machine-translationese. In experiments with massively multilingual machine translation models across 20 translation directions, we confirm the effectiveness of the approach for high-resource language pairs, achieving document-level accuracies of 82-96% for NMT-produced translations, and 60-81% for human translations, depending on the model used. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/translation-direction-detection

We demonstrate the potential of few-shot translation systems, trained with unpaired language data, for both high and low-resource language pairs. We show that with only 5 examples of high-quality translation data shown at inference, a transformer decoder-only model trained solely with self-supervised learning, is able to match specialized supervised state-of-the-art models as well as more general commercial translation systems. In particular, we outperform the best performing system on the WMT'21 English - Chinese news translation task by only using five examples of English - Chinese parallel data at inference. Moreover, our approach in building these models does not necessitate joint multilingual training or back-translation, is conceptually simple and shows the potential to extend to the multilingual setting. Furthermore, the resulting models are two orders of magnitude smaller than state-of-the-art language models. We then analyze the factors which impact the performance of few-shot translation systems, and highlight that the quality of the few-shot demonstrations heavily determines the quality of the translations generated by our models. Finally, we show that the few-shot paradigm also provides a way to control certain attributes of the translation -- we show that we are able to control for regional varieties and formality using only a five examples at inference, paving the way towards controllable machine translation systems.

Neural sequence-to-sequence models provide a competitive approach to the task of mapping a question in natural language to an SQL query, also referred to as text-to-SQL generation. The Byte-Pair Encoding algorithm (BPE) has previously been used to improve machine translation (MT) between natural languages. In this work, we adapt BPE for text-to-SQL generation. As the datasets for this task are rather small compared to MT, we present a novel stopping criterion that prevents overfitting the BPE encoding to the training set. Additionally, we present AST BPE, which is a version of BPE that uses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the SQL statement to guide BPE merges and therefore produce BPE encodings that generalize better. We improved the accuracy of a strong attentive seq2seq baseline on five out of six English text-to-SQL tasks while reducing training time by more than 50% on four of them due to the shortened targets. Finally, on two of these tasks we exceeded previously reported accuracies.

Semantics of a sentence is defined with much less ambiguity than semantics of a single word, and it should be better preserved by translation to another language. If multilingual sentence embeddings intend to represent sentence semantics, then the similarity between embeddings of any two sentences must be invariant with respect to translation. Based on this suggestion, we consider a simple linear cross-lingual mapping as a possible improvement of the multilingual embeddings. We also consider deviation from orthogonality conditions as a measure of deficiency of the embeddings.

This paper describes the development of a new benchmark for machine translation that provides training and test data for thousands of language pairs covering over 500 languages and tools for creating state-of-the-art translation models from that collection. The main goal is to trigger the development of open translation tools and models with a much broader coverage of the World's languages. Using the package it is possible to work on realistic low-resource scenarios avoiding artificially reduced setups that are common when demonstrating zero-shot or few-shot learning. For the first time, this package provides a comprehensive collection of diverse data sets in hundreds of languages with systematic language and script annotation and data splits to extend the narrow coverage of existing benchmarks. Together with the data release, we also provide a growing number of pre-trained baseline models for individual language pairs and selected language groups.

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to model the sequential dependencies in users' historical interactions to better capture their evolving interests. However, existing SR approaches primarily rely on collaborative data, which leads to limitations such as the cold-start problem and sub-optimal performance. Meanwhile, despite the success of large language models (LLMs), their application in industrial recommender systems is hindered by high inference latency, inability to capture all distribution statistics, and catastrophic forgetting. To this end, we propose a novel Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle (PAD) paradigm to empower recommendation models with LLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train both the SR and LLM models to get collaborative and textual embeddings. Next, a characteristic recommendation-anchored alignment loss is proposed using multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy with Gaussian kernels. Finally, a triple-experts architecture, consisting aligned and modality-specific experts with disentangled embeddings, is fine-tuned in a frequency-aware manner. Experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PAD, showing significant improvements and compatibility with various SR backbone models, especially on cold items. The implementation code and datasets will be publicly available.

For multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretrained language models (multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs), e.g. mBART, the self-supervised pretraining task is trained on a wide range of monolingual languages, e.g. 25 languages from CommonCrawl, while the downstream cross-lingual tasks generally progress on a bilingual language subset, e.g. English-German, making there exists the data discrepancy, namely domain discrepancy, and cross-lingual learning objective discrepancy, namely task discrepancy, between the pretraining and finetuning stages. To bridge the above cross-lingual domain and task gaps, we extend the vanilla pretrain-finetune pipeline with extra code-switching restore task. Specifically, the first stage employs the self-supervised code-switching restore task as a pretext task, allowing the multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs to acquire some in-domain alignment information. And for the second stage, we fine-tune the model on downstream data normally. Experiments on both NLG evaluation (12 bilingual translation tasks, 30 zero-shot translation tasks, and 2 cross-lingual summarization tasks) and NLU evaluation (7 cross-lingual natural language inference tasks) show our model outperforms the strong baseline mBART with standard finetuning strategy, consistently. Analyses indicate our approach could narrow the Euclidean distance of cross-lingual sentence representations, and improve the model generalization with trivial computational cost. We release the code at: https://github.com/zanchangtong/CSR4mBART.

Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT), yet the broad language coverage, consistent translation quality, and English-centric bias remain open challenges. To address these challenges, we introduce LMT, a suite of Large-scale Multilingual Translation models centered on both Chinese and English, covering 60 languages and 234 translation directions. During development, we identify a previously overlooked phenomenon of directional degeneration, where symmetric multi-way fine-tuning data overemphasize reverse directions (X to En/Zh), leading to excessive many-to-one mappings and degraded translation quality. We propose Strategic Downsampling, a simple yet effective method to mitigate this degeneration. In addition, we design Parallel Multilingual Prompting (PMP), which leverages typologically related auxiliary languages to enhance cross-lingual transfer. Through rigorous data curation and refined adaptation strategies, LMT achieves SOTA performance among models of comparable language coverage, with our 4B model (LMT-60-4B) surpassing the much larger Aya-101-13B and NLLB-54B models by a substantial margin. We release LMT in four sizes (0.6B/1.7B/4B/8B) to catalyze future research and provide strong baselines for inclusive, scalable, and high-quality MMT \href{https://github.com/NiuTrans/LMT{https://github.com/NiuTrans/LMT}}.

Automatic subtitling is the task of automatically translating the speech of audiovisual content into short pieces of timed text, i.e. subtitles and their corresponding timestamps. The generated subtitles need to conform to space and time requirements, while being synchronised with the speech and segmented in a way that facilitates comprehension. Given its considerable complexity, the task has so far been addressed through a pipeline of components that separately deal with transcribing, translating, and segmenting text into subtitles, as well as predicting timestamps. In this paper, we propose the first direct ST model for automatic subtitling that generates subtitles in the target language along with their timestamps with a single model. Our experiments on 7 language pairs show that our approach outperforms a cascade system in the same data condition, also being competitive with production tools on both in-domain and newly-released out-domain benchmarks covering new scenarios.

While general-purpose large language models (LLMs) demonstrate proficiency on multiple tasks within the domain of translation, approaches based on open LLMs are competitive only when specializing on a single task. In this paper, we propose a recipe for tailoring LLMs to multiple tasks present in translation workflows. We perform continued pretraining on a multilingual mixture of monolingual and parallel data, creating TowerBase, followed by finetuning on instructions relevant for translation processes, creating TowerInstruct. Our final model surpasses open alternatives on several tasks relevant to translation workflows and is competitive with general-purpose closed LLMs. To facilitate future research, we release the Tower models, our specialization dataset, an evaluation framework for LLMs focusing on the translation ecosystem, and a collection of model generations, including ours, on our benchmark.

Recently, substantial progress has been made in text ranking based on pretrained language models such as BERT. However, there are limited studies on how to leverage more powerful sequence-to-sequence models such as T5. Existing attempts usually formulate text ranking as classification and rely on postprocessing to obtain a ranked list. In this paper, we propose RankT5 and study two T5-based ranking model structures, an encoder-decoder and an encoder-only one, so that they not only can directly output ranking scores for each query-document pair, but also can be fine-tuned with "pairwise" or "listwise" ranking losses to optimize ranking performances. Our experiments show that the proposed models with ranking losses can achieve substantial ranking performance gains on different public text ranking data sets. Moreover, when fine-tuned with listwise ranking losses, the ranking model appears to have better zero-shot ranking performance on out-of-domain data sets compared to the model fine-tuned with classification losses.

We introduce SONAR, a new multilingual and multimodal fixed-size sentence embedding space. Our single text encoder, covering 200 languages, substantially outperforms existing sentence embeddings such as LASER3 and LabSE on the xsim and xsim++ multilingual similarity search tasks. Speech segments can be embedded in the same SONAR embedding space using language-specific speech encoders trained in a teacher-student setting on speech transcription data. Our encoders outperform existing speech encoders on similarity search tasks. We also provide a text decoder for 200 languages, which allows us to perform text-to-text and speech-to-text machine translation, including for zero-shot language and modality combinations. Our text-to-text results are competitive compared to the state-of-the-art NLLB~1B model, despite the fixed-size bottleneck representation. Our zero-shot speech-to-text translation results compare favorably with strong supervised baselines such as Whisper.

Machine translation for Sranantongo (Sranan, srn), a low-resource Creole language spoken predominantly in Surinam, is virgin territory. In this study we create a general purpose machine translation system for srn. In order to facilitate this research, we introduce the SRNcorpus, a collection of parallel Dutch (nl) to srn and monolingual srn data. We experiment with a wide range of proven machine translation methods. Our results demonstrate a strong baseline machine translation system for srn.

We introduce DivEMT, the first publicly available post-editing study of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) over a typologically diverse set of target languages. Using a strictly controlled setup, 18 professional translators were instructed to translate or post-edit the same set of English documents into Arabic, Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. During the process, their edits, keystrokes, editing times and pauses were recorded, enabling an in-depth, cross-lingual evaluation of NMT quality and post-editing effectiveness. Using this new dataset, we assess the impact of two state-of-the-art NMT systems, Google Translate and the multilingual mBART-50 model, on translation productivity. We find that post-editing is consistently faster than translation from scratch. However, the magnitude of productivity gains varies widely across systems and languages, highlighting major disparities in post-editing effectiveness for languages at different degrees of typological relatedness to English, even when controlling for system architecture and training data size. We publicly release the complete dataset including all collected behavioral data, to foster new research on the translation capabilities of NMT systems for typologically diverse languages.

Large pretrained language models have recently conquered the area of natural language processing. As an alternative to predominant masked language modelling introduced in BERT, the T5 model has introduced a more general training objective, namely sequence to sequence transformation, which includes masked language model but more naturally fits text generation tasks such as machine translation, summarization, question answering, text simplification, dialogue systems, etc. The monolingual variants of T5 models have been limited to well-resourced languages, while the massively multilingual T5 model supports 101 languages. In contrast, we trained two different sized T5-type sequence to sequence models for morphologically rich Slovene language with much less resources and analyzed their behavior on 11 tasks. Concerning classification tasks, the SloT5 models mostly lag behind the monolingual Slovene SloBERTa model but are useful for the generative tasks.

We present a parallel machine translation training corpus for English and Akuapem Twi of 25,421 sentence pairs. We used a transformer-based translator to generate initial translations in Akuapem Twi, which were later verified and corrected where necessary by native speakers to eliminate any occurrence of translationese. In addition, 697 higher quality crowd-sourced sentences are provided for use as an evaluation set for downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The typical use case for the larger human-verified dataset is for further training of machine translation models in Akuapem Twi. The higher quality 697 crowd-sourced dataset is recommended as a testing dataset for machine translation of English to Twi and Twi to English models. Furthermore, the Twi part of the crowd-sourced data may also be used for other tasks, such as representation learning, classification, etc. We fine-tune the transformer translation model on the training corpus and report benchmarks on the crowd-sourced test set.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to follow a sequence of instructions in a single query as they may ignore or misinterpret part of it. This impairs their performance in complex problems whose solution requires multiple intermediate steps, such as multilingual (translate then answer) and multimodal (caption then answer) tasks. We empirically verify this with open-source LLMs as large as LLaMA-2 70B and Mixtral-8x7B. Targeting the scarcity of sequential instructions in present-day data, we propose sequential instruction tuning, a simple yet effective strategy to automatically augment instruction tuning data and equip LLMs with the ability to execute multiple sequential instructions. After exploring interleaving instructions in existing datasets, such as Alpaca, with a wide range of intermediate tasks, we find that sequential instruction-tuned models consistently outperform the conventional instruction-tuned baselines in downstream tasks involving reasoning, multilingual, and multimodal abilities. To shed further light on our technique, we analyse how adversarial intermediate texts, unseen tasks, prompt verbalization, number of tasks, and prompt length affect SIT. We hope that this method will open new research avenues on instruction tuning for complex tasks.

The dominant text generation models compose the output by sequentially selecting words from a fixed vocabulary. In this paper, we formulate text generation as progressively copying text segments (e.g., words or phrases) from an existing text collection. We compute the contextualized representations of meaningful text segments and index them using efficient vector search toolkits. The task of text generation is then decomposed into a series of copy-and-paste operations: at each time step, we seek suitable text spans from the text collection rather than selecting from a standalone vocabulary. Experiments on the standard language modeling benchmark (WikiText-103) show that our approach achieves better generation quality according to both automatic and human evaluations. Besides, its inference efficiency is comparable to token-level autoregressive models thanks to the reduction of decoding steps. We also show that our approach allows for effective domain adaptation by simply switching to domain-specific text collection without extra training. Finally, we observe that our approach attains additional performance gains by simply scaling up to larger text collections, again without further training.Our source codes are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/gmftbyGMFTBY/Copyisallyouneed.}

Neural machine translation (NMT) models typically operate with a fixed vocabulary, but translation is an open-vocabulary problem. Previous work addresses the translation of out-of-vocabulary words by backing off to a dictionary. In this paper, we introduce a simpler and more effective approach, making the NMT model capable of open-vocabulary translation by encoding rare and unknown words as sequences of subword units. This is based on the intuition that various word classes are translatable via smaller units than words, for instance names (via character copying or transliteration), compounds (via compositional translation), and cognates and loanwords (via phonological and morphological transformations). We discuss the suitability of different word segmentation techniques, including simple character n-gram models and a segmentation based on the byte pair encoding compression algorithm, and empirically show that subword models improve over a back-off dictionary baseline for the WMT 15 translation tasks English-German and English-Russian by 1.1 and 1.3 BLEU, respectively.

Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have pushed the quality of machine translation systems to the point where they are becoming widely adopted to build competitive systems. However, there is still a large number of languages that are yet to reap the benefits of NMT. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale case study of the practical application of MT in the Turkic language family in order to realize the gains of NMT for Turkic languages under high-resource to extremely low-resource scenarios. In addition to presenting an extensive analysis that identifies the bottlenecks towards building competitive systems to ameliorate data scarcity, our study has several key contributions, including, i) a large parallel corpus covering 22 Turkic languages consisting of common public datasets in combination with new datasets of approximately 2 million parallel sentences, ii) bilingual baselines for 26 language pairs, iii) novel high-quality test sets in three different translation domains and iv) human evaluation scores. All models, scripts, and data will be released to the public.

Speech Language Models (SLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on speech translation tasks. However, existing research primarily focuses on direct instruction fine-tuning and often overlooks the inherent reasoning capabilities of SLMs. In this paper, we introduce a three-stage training framework designed to activate the chain-of-thought (CoT) capabilities of SLMs. We propose CoT-ST, a speech translation model that utilizes multimodal CoT to decompose speech translation into sequential steps of speech recognition and translation. We validated the effectiveness of our method on two datasets: the CoVoST-2 dataset and MuST-C dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that CoT-ST outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher BLEU scores (CoVoST-2 en-ja: 30.5->30.8, en-zh: 45.2->47.7, MuST-C en-zh: 19.6->21.2). This work is open sourced at https://github.com/X-LANCE/SLAM-LLM/tree/main/examples/st_covost2 .

Recent work has witnessed a paradigm shift from Seq2Seq to Seq2Edit in the field of text editing, with the aim of addressing the slow autoregressive inference problem posed by the former. Despite promising results, Seq2Edit approaches still face several challenges such as inflexibility in generation and difficulty in generalizing to other languages. In this work, we propose a novel non-autoregressive text editing method to circumvent the above issues, by modeling the edit process with latent CTC alignments. We make a crucial extension to CTC by introducing the copy operation into the edit space, thus enabling more efficient management of textual overlap in editing. We conduct extensive experiments on GEC and sentence fusion tasks, showing that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing Seq2Edit models and achieves similar or even better results than Seq2Seq with over 4times speedup. Moreover, it demonstrates good generalizability on German and Russian. In-depth analyses reveal the strengths of our method in terms of the robustness under various scenarios and generating fluent and flexible outputs.

This paper presents the OPUS ecosystem with a focus on the development of open machine translation models and tools, and their integration into end-user applications, development platforms and professional workflows. We discuss our on-going mission of increasing language coverage and translation quality, and also describe on-going work on the development of modular translation models and speed-optimized compact solutions for real-time translation on regular desktops and small devices.

Multilingual pre-trained models (mPLMs) have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual transfer tasks. However, the transfer performance is often hindered when a low-resource target language is written in a different script than the high-resource source language, even though the two languages may be related or share parts of their vocabularies. Inspired by recent work that uses transliteration to address this problem, our paper proposes a transliteration-based post-pretraining alignment (PPA) method aiming to improve the cross-lingual alignment between languages using diverse scripts. We select two areal language groups, Mediterranean-Amharic-Farsi and South+East Asian Languages, wherein the languages are mutually influenced but use different scripts. We apply our method to these language groups and conduct extensive experiments on a spectrum of downstream tasks. The results show that after PPA, models consistently outperform the original model (up to 50% for some tasks) in English-centric transfer. In addition, when we use languages other than English as sources in transfer, our method obtains even larger improvements. We will make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA.

The output structure of database-like tables, consisting of values structured in horizontal rows and vertical columns identifiable by name, can cover a wide range of NLP tasks. Following this constatation, we propose a framework for text-to-table neural models applicable to problems such as extraction of line items, joint entity and relation extraction, or knowledge base population. The permutation-based decoder of our proposal is a generalized sequential method that comprehends information from all cells in the table. The training maximizes the expected log-likelihood for a table's content across all random permutations of the factorization order. During the content inference, we exploit the model's ability to generate cells in any order by searching over possible orderings to maximize the model's confidence and avoid substantial error accumulation, which other sequential models are prone to. Experiments demonstrate a high practical value of the framework, which establishes state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets, outperforming previous solutions by up to 15%.

We introduce ParaNames, a massively multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 140 million names spanning over 400 languages. Names are provided for 16.8 million entities, and each entity is mapped from a complex type hierarchy to a standard type (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate the usefulness of ParaNames on two tasks. First, we perform canonical name translation between English and 17 other languages. Second, we use it as a gazetteer for multilingual named entity recognition, obtaining performance improvements on all 10 languages evaluated.

Neural machine translation (NMT) methods developed for natural language processing have been shown to be highly successful in automating translation from one natural language to another. Recently, these NMT methods have been adapted to the generation of program code. In NMT for code generation, the task is to generate output source code that satisfies constraints expressed in the input. In the literature, a variety of different input scenarios have been explored, including generating code based on natural language description, lower-level representations such as binary or assembly (neural decompilation), partial representations of source code (code completion and repair), and source code in another language (code translation). In this paper we survey the NMT for code generation literature, cataloging the variety of methods that have been explored according to input and output representations, model architectures, optimization techniques used, data sets, and evaluation methods. We discuss the limitations of existing methods and future research directions

Recurrent models have been dominating the field of neural machine translation (NMT) for the past few years. Transformers vaswani2017attention, have radically changed it by proposing a novel architecture that relies on a feed-forward backbone and self-attention mechanism. Although Transformers are powerful, they could fail to properly encode sequential/positional information due to their non-recurrent nature. To solve this problem, position embeddings are defined exclusively for each time step to enrich word information. However, such embeddings are fixed after training regardless of the task and the word ordering system of the source or target language. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture with new position embeddings depending on the input text to address this shortcoming by taking the order of target words into consideration. Instead of using predefined position embeddings, our solution generates new embeddings to refine each word's position information. Since we do not dictate the position of source tokens and learn them in an end-to-end fashion, we refer to our method as dynamic position encoding (DPE). We evaluated the impact of our model on multiple datasets to translate from English into German, French, and Italian and observed meaningful improvements in comparison to the original Transformer.

With the rapid development of the internet, online social media welcomes people with different backgrounds through its diverse content. The increasing usage of emoji becomes a noticeable trend thanks to emoji's rich information beyond cultural or linguistic borders. However, the current study on emojis is limited to single emoji prediction and there are limited data resources available for further study of the interesting linguistic phenomenon. To this end, we synthesize a large text-emoji parallel corpus, Text2Emoji, from a large language model. Based on the parallel corpus, we distill a sequence-to-sequence model, EmojiLM, which is specialized in the text-emoji bidirectional translation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and human evaluation demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms strong baselines and the parallel corpus benefits emoji-related downstream tasks.

Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousands of language directions with supervised data, created through large-scale mining. Then, we explore how to effectively increase model capacity through a combination of dense scaling and language-specific sparse parameters to create high quality models. Our focus on non-English-Centric models brings gains of more than 10 BLEU when directly translating between non-English directions while performing competitively to the best single systems of WMT. We open-source our scripts so that others may reproduce the data, evaluation, and final M2M-100 model.

The overall translation quality reached by current machine translation (MT) systems for high-resourced language pairs is remarkably good. Standard methods of evaluation are not suitable nor intended to uncover the many translation errors and quality deficiencies that still persist. Furthermore, the quality of standard reference translations is commonly questioned and comparable quality levels have been reached by MT alone in several language pairs. Navigating further research in these high-resource settings is thus difficult. In this article, we propose a methodology for creating more reliable document-level human reference translations, called "optimal reference translations," with the simple aim to raise the bar of what should be deemed "human translation quality." We evaluate the obtained document-level optimal reference translations in comparison with "standard" ones, confirming a significant quality increase and also documenting the relationship between evaluation and translation editing.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency across a broad spectrum of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including Machine Translation. However, previous methods predominantly relied on iterative processes such as instruction fine-tuning or continual pre-training, leaving unexplored the challenges of training LLMs solely on parallel data. In this work, we introduce PLUME (Parallel Language Model), a collection of three 2B LLMs featuring varying vocabulary sizes (32k, 128k, and 256k) trained exclusively on Catalan-centric parallel examples. These models perform comparably to previous encoder-decoder architectures on 16 supervised translation directions and 56 zero-shot ones. Utilizing this set of models, we conduct a thorough investigation into the translation capabilities of LLMs, probing their performance, the impact of the different elements of the prompt, and their cross-lingual representation space.

Neural machine translation (NMT) is nowadays commonly applied at the subword level, using byte-pair encoding. A promising alternative approach focuses on character-level translation, which simplifies processing pipelines in NMT considerably. This approach, however, must consider relatively longer sequences, rendering the training process prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we discuss a novel, Transformer-based approach, that we compare, both in speed and in quality to the Transformer at subword and character levels, as well as previously developed character-level models. We evaluate our models on 4 language pairs from WMT'15: DE-EN, CS-EN, FI-EN and RU-EN. The proposed novel architecture can be trained on a single GPU and is 34% percent faster than the character-level Transformer; still, the obtained results are at least on par with it. In addition, our proposed model outperforms the subword-level model in FI-EN and shows close results in CS-EN. To stimulate further research in this area and close the gap with subword-level NMT, we make all our code and models publicly available.

Multilingual neural machine translation systems learn to map sentences of different languages into a common representation space. Intuitively, with a growing number of seen languages the encoder sentence representation grows more flexible and easily adaptable to new languages. In this work, we test this hypothesis by zero-shot translating from unseen languages. To deal with unknown vocabularies from unknown languages we propose a setup where we decouple learning of vocabulary and syntax, i.e. for each language we learn word representations in a separate step (using cross-lingual word embeddings), and then train to translate while keeping those word representations frozen. We demonstrate that this setup enables zero-shot translation from entirely unseen languages. Zero-shot translating with a model trained on Germanic and Romance languages we achieve scores of 42.6 BLEU for Portuguese-English and 20.7 BLEU for Russian-English on TED domain. We explore how this zero-shot translation capability develops with varying number of languages seen by the encoder. Lastly, we explore the effectiveness of our decoupled learning strategy for unsupervised machine translation. By exploiting our model's zero-shot translation capability for iterative back-translation we attain near parity with a supervised setting.

Differently from the traditional statistical MT that decomposes the translation task into distinct separately learned components, neural machine translation uses a single neural network to model the entire translation process. Despite neural machine translation being de-facto standard, it is still not clear how NMT models acquire different competences over the course of training, and how this mirrors the different models in traditional SMT. In this work, we look at the competences related to three core SMT components and find that during training, NMT first focuses on learning target-side language modeling, then improves translation quality approaching word-by-word translation, and finally learns more complicated reordering patterns. We show that this behavior holds for several models and language pairs. Additionally, we explain how such an understanding of the training process can be useful in practice and, as an example, show how it can be used to improve vanilla non-autoregressive neural machine translation by guiding teacher model selection.

The remarkable capability of large language models (LLMs) for in-context learning (ICL) needs to be activated by demonstration examples. Prior work has extensively explored the selection of examples for ICL, predominantly following the "select then organize" paradigm, such approaches often neglect the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between the training and inference. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a sequential selection problem and introduce Se^2, a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM's feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples, significantly enriching the contextuality and relevance of ICL prompts. Meanwhile, we utilize beam search to seek and construct example sequences, enhancing both quality and diversity. Extensive experiments across 23 NLP tasks from 8 distinct categories illustrate that Se^2 markedly surpasses competitive baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. Further in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of proposed strategies, highlighting Se^2's exceptional stability and adaptability across various scenarios. Our code will be released to facilitate future research.

Data of sequential nature arise in many application domains in forms of, e.g. textual data, DNA sequences, and software execution traces. Different research disciplines have developed methods to learn sequence models from such datasets: (i) in the machine learning field methods such as (hidden) Markov models and recurrent neural networks have been developed and successfully applied to a wide-range of tasks, (ii) in process mining process discovery techniques aim to generate human-interpretable descriptive models, and (iii) in the grammar inference field the focus is on finding descriptive models in the form of formal grammars. Despite their different focuses, these fields share a common goal - learning a model that accurately describes the behavior in the underlying data. Those sequence models are generative, i.e, they can predict what elements are likely to occur after a given unfinished sequence. So far, these fields have developed mainly in isolation from each other and no comparison exists. This paper presents an interdisciplinary experimental evaluation that compares sequence modeling techniques on the task of next-element prediction on four real-life sequence datasets. The results indicate that machine learning techniques that generally have no aim at interpretability in terms of accuracy outperform techniques from the process mining and grammar inference fields that aim to yield interpretable models.

Subtitling plays a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of audiovisual content and encompasses three primary subtasks: translating spoken dialogue, segmenting translations into concise textual units, and estimating timestamps that govern their on-screen duration. Past attempts to automate this process rely, to varying degrees, on automatic transcripts, employed diversely for the three subtasks. In response to the acknowledged limitations associated with this reliance on transcripts, recent research has shifted towards transcription-free solutions for translation and segmentation, leaving the direct generation of timestamps as uncharted territory. To fill this gap, we introduce the first direct model capable of producing automatic subtitles, entirely eliminating any dependence on intermediate transcripts also for timestamp prediction. Experimental results, backed by manual evaluation, showcase our solution's new state-of-the-art performance across multiple language pairs and diverse conditions.

Dictionaries and phrase tables are the basis of modern statistical machine translation systems. This paper develops a method that can automate the process of generating and extending dictionaries and phrase tables. Our method can translate missing word and phrase entries by learning language structures based on large monolingual data and mapping between languages from small bilingual data. It uses distributed representation of words and learns a linear mapping between vector spaces of languages. Despite its simplicity, our method is surprisingly effective: we can achieve almost 90% precision@5 for translation of words between English and Spanish. This method makes little assumption about the languages, so it can be used to extend and refine dictionaries and translation tables for any language pairs.

Zero-resource cross-lingual transfer approaches aim to apply supervised models from a source language to unlabelled target languages. In this paper we perform an in-depth study of the two main techniques employed so far for cross-lingual zero-resource sequence labelling, based either on data or model transfer. Although previous research has proposed translation and annotation projection (data-based cross-lingual transfer) as an effective technique for cross-lingual sequence labelling, in this paper we experimentally demonstrate that high capacity multilingual language models applied in a zero-shot (model-based cross-lingual transfer) setting consistently outperform data-based cross-lingual transfer approaches. A detailed analysis of our results suggests that this might be due to important differences in language use. More specifically, machine translation often generates a textual signal which is different to what the models are exposed to when using gold standard data, which affects both the fine-tuning and evaluation processes. Our results also indicate that data-based cross-lingual transfer approaches remain a competitive option when high-capacity multilingual language models are not available.

We study unsupervised multilingual alignment, the problem of finding word-to-word translations between multiple languages without using any parallel data. One popular strategy is to reduce multilingual alignment to the much simplified bilingual setting, by picking one of the input languages as the pivot language that we transit through. However, it is well-known that transiting through a poorly chosen pivot language (such as English) may severely degrade the translation quality, since the assumed transitive relations among all pairs of languages may not be enforced in the training process. Instead of going through a rather arbitrarily chosen pivot language, we propose to use the Wasserstein barycenter as a more informative "mean" language: it encapsulates information from all languages and minimizes all pairwise transportation costs. We evaluate our method on standard benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performances.

Large language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) can perform arbitrary tasks without undergoing fine-tuning after being prompted with only a few labeled examples. An arbitrary task can be reformulated as a natural language prompt, and a language model can be asked to generate the completion, indirectly performing the task in a paradigm known as prompt-based learning. To date, emergent prompt-based learning capabilities have mainly been demonstrated for unidirectional language models. However, bidirectional language models pre-trained on denoising objectives such as masked language modeling produce stronger learned representations for transfer learning. This motivates the possibility of prompting bidirectional models, but their pre-training objectives have made them largely incompatible with the existing prompting paradigm. We present SAP (Sequential Autoregressive Prompting), a technique that enables the prompting of bidirectional models. Utilizing the machine translation task as a case study, we prompt the bidirectional mT5 model (Xue et al., 2021) with SAP and demonstrate its few-shot and zero-shot translations outperform the few-shot translations of unidirectional models like GPT-3 and XGLM (Lin et al., 2021), despite mT5's approximately 50% fewer parameters. We further show SAP is effective on question answering and summarization. For the first time, our results demonstrate prompt-based learning is an emergent property of a broader class of language models, rather than only unidirectional models.

Recent work in speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) has focused primarily on offline settings, where the full input utterance is available before any output is given. This, however, is not reasonable in many real-world scenarios. In latency-sensitive applications, rather than waiting for the full utterance, translations should be spoken as soon as the information in the input is present. In this work, we introduce a system for simultaneous S2ST targeting real-world use cases. Our system supports translation from 57 languages to English with tunable parameters for dynamically adjusting the latency of the output -- including four policies for determining when to speak an output sequence. We show that these policies achieve offline-level accuracy with minimal increases in latency over a Greedy (wait-k) baseline. We open-source our evaluation code and interactive test script to aid future SimulS2ST research and application development.

AI creation, such as poem or lyrics generation, has attracted increasing attention from both industry and academic communities, with many promising models proposed in the past few years. Existing methods usually estimate the outputs based on single and independent visual or textual information. However, in reality, humans usually make creations according to their experiences, which may involve different modalities and be sequentially correlated. To model such human capabilities, in this paper, we define and solve a novel AI creation problem based on human experiences. More specifically, we study how to generate texts based on sequential multi-modal information. Compared with the previous works, this task is much more difficult because the designed model has to well understand and adapt the semantics among different modalities and effectively convert them into the output in a sequential manner. To alleviate these difficulties, we firstly design a multi-channel sequence-to-sequence architecture equipped with a multi-modal attention network. For more effective optimization, we then propose a curriculum negative sampling strategy tailored for the sequential inputs. To benchmark this problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we manually labeled a new multi-modal experience dataset. With this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments by comparing our model with a series of representative baselines, where we can demonstrate significant improvements in our model based on both automatic and human-centered metrics. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/MMTG.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, such as question answering, translation, text summarization, and dialogue systems, the need for accuracy in information becomes crucial, especially for serious financial products serving billions of users like Alipay. To address this, Alipay has developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that grounds LLMs on the most accurate and up-to-date information. However, for a real-world product serving millions of users, the inference speed of LLMs becomes a critical factor compared to a mere experimental model. Hence, this paper presents a generic framework for accelerating the inference process, resulting in a substantial increase in speed and cost reduction for our RAG system, with lossless generation accuracy. In the traditional inference process, each token is generated sequentially by the LLM, leading to a time consumption proportional to the number of generated tokens. To enhance this process, our framework, named lookahead, introduces a multi-branch strategy. Instead of generating a single token at a time, we propose a Trie-based Retrieval (TR) process that enables the generation of multiple branches simultaneously, each of which is a sequence of tokens. Subsequently, for each branch, a Verification and Accept (VA) process is performed to identify the longest correct sub-sequence as the final output. Our strategy offers two distinct advantages: (1) it guarantees absolute correctness of the output, avoiding any approximation algorithms, and (2) the worst-case performance of our approach is equivalent to the conventional process. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the significant improvements achieved by applying our inference acceleration framework. Code is avaliable: https://github.com/alipay/PainlessInferenceAcceleration.

Simultaneous Interpretation (SI) represents one of the most daunting frontiers in the translation industry, with product-level automatic systems long plagued by intractable challenges: subpar transcription and translation quality, lack of real-time speech generation, multi-speaker confusion, and translated speech inflation, especially in long-form discourses. In this study, we introduce Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0, an end-to-end SI model that delivers high-fidelity, ultra-low-latency speech-to-speech generation with voice cloning capabilities. As a fully operational product-level solution, Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0 tackles these challenges head-on through our novel duplex speech-to-speech understanding-generating framework. Experimental results demonstrate that through large-scale pretraining and reinforcement learning, the model achieves a significantly better balance between translation accuracy and latency, validated by human interpreters to exceed 70% correctness in complex scenarios. Notably, Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0 outperforms commercial SI solutions by significant margins in translation quality, while slashing the average latency of cloned speech from nearly 10 seconds to a near-real-time 3 seconds, which is around a near 70% reduction that drastically enhances practical usability.

Large multilingual language models such as mBERT or XLM-R enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in various IR and NLP tasks. Cao et al. (2020) proposed a data- and compute-efficient method for cross-lingual adjustment of mBERT that uses a small parallel corpus to make embeddings of related words across languages similar to each other. They showed it to be effective in NLI for five European languages. In contrast we experiment with a typologically diverse set of languages (Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, and Hindi) and extend their original implementations to new tasks (XSR, NER, and QA) and an additional training regime (continual learning). Our study reproduced gains in NLI for four languages, showed improved NER, XSR, and cross-lingual QA results in three languages (though some cross-lingual QA gains were not statistically significant), while mono-lingual QA performance never improved and sometimes degraded. Analysis of distances between contextualized embeddings of related and unrelated words (across languages) showed that fine-tuning leads to "forgetting" some of the cross-lingual alignment information. Based on this observation, we further improved NLI performance using continual learning.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities including understanding context, engaging in logical reasoning, and generating responses. However, this is achieved at the expense of stringent computational and memory requirements, hindering their ability to effectively support long input sequences. This survey provides an inclusive review of the recent techniques and methods devised to extend the sequence length in LLMs, thereby enhancing their capacity for long-context understanding. In particular, we review and categorize a wide range of techniques including architectural modifications, such as modified positional encoding and altered attention mechanisms, which are designed to enhance the processing of longer sequences while avoiding a proportional increase in computational requirements. The diverse methodologies investigated in this study can be leveraged across different phases of LLMs, i.e., training, fine-tuning and inference. This enables LLMs to efficiently process extended sequences. The limitations of the current methodologies is discussed in the last section along with the suggestions for future research directions, underscoring the importance of sequence length in the continued advancement of LLMs.

We present the Charles University system for the MRL~2023 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval. The goal of the shared task was to develop systems for named entity recognition and question answering in several under-represented languages. Our solutions to both subtasks rely on the translate-test approach. We first translate the unlabeled examples into English using a multilingual machine translation model. Then, we run inference on the translated data using a strong task-specific model. Finally, we project the labeled data back into the original language. To keep the inferred tags on the correct positions in the original language, we propose a method based on scoring the candidate positions using a label-sensitive translation model. In both settings, we experiment with finetuning the classification models on the translated data. However, due to a domain mismatch between the development data and the shared task validation and test sets, the finetuned models could not outperform our baselines.

We describe the JD Explore Academy's submission of the WMT 2022 shared general translation task. We participated in all high-resource tracks and one medium-resource track, including Chinese-English, German-English, Czech-English, Russian-English, and Japanese-English. We push the limit of our previous work -- bidirectional training for translation by scaling up two main factors, i.e. language pairs and model sizes, namely the Vega-MT system. As for language pairs, we scale the "bidirectional" up to the "multidirectional" settings, covering all participating languages, to exploit the common knowledge across languages, and transfer them to the downstream bilingual tasks. As for model sizes, we scale the Transformer-Big up to the extremely large model that owns nearly 4.7 Billion parameters, to fully enhance the model capacity for our Vega-MT. Also, we adopt the data augmentation strategies, e.g. cycle translation for monolingual data, and bidirectional self-training for bilingual and monolingual data, to comprehensively exploit the bilingual and monolingual data. To adapt our Vega-MT to the general domain test set, generalization tuning is designed. Based on the official automatic scores of constrained systems, in terms of the sacreBLEU shown in Figure-1, we got the 1st place on {Zh-En (33.5), En-Zh (49.7), De-En (33.7), En-De (37.8), Cs-En (54.9), En-Cs (41.4) and En-Ru (32.7)}, 2nd place on {Ru-En (45.1) and Ja-En (25.6)}, and 3rd place on {En-Ja(41.5)}, respectively; W.R.T the COMET, we got the 1st place on {Zh-En (45.1), En-Zh (61.7), De-En (58.0), En-De (63.2), Cs-En (74.7), Ru-En (64.9), En-Ru (69.6) and En-Ja (65.1)}, 2nd place on {En-Cs (95.3) and Ja-En (40.6)}, respectively.

English to Indian language machine translation poses the challenge of structural and morphological divergence. This paper describes English to Indian language statistical machine translation using pre-ordering and suffix separation. The pre-ordering uses rules to transfer the structure of the source sentences prior to training and translation. This syntactic restructuring helps statistical machine translation to tackle the structural divergence and hence better translation quality. The suffix separation is used to tackle the morphological divergence between English and highly agglutinative Indian languages. We demonstrate that the use of pre-ordering and suffix separation helps in improving the quality of English to Indian Language machine translation.

A central goal of sequence modeling is designing a single principled model that can address sequence data across a range of modalities and tasks, particularly on long-range dependencies. Although conventional models including RNNs, CNNs, and Transformers have specialized variants for capturing long dependencies, they still struggle to scale to very long sequences of 10000 or more steps. A promising recent approach proposed modeling sequences by simulating the fundamental state space model (SSM) \( x'(t) = Ax(t) + Bu(t), y(t) = Cx(t) + Du(t) \), and showed that for appropriate choices of the state matrix \( A \), this system could handle long-range dependencies mathematically and empirically. However, this method has prohibitive computation and memory requirements, rendering it infeasible as a general sequence modeling solution. We propose the Structured State Space sequence model (S4) based on a new parameterization for the SSM, and show that it can be computed much more efficiently than prior approaches while preserving their theoretical strengths. Our technique involves conditioning \( A \) with a low-rank correction, allowing it to be diagonalized stably and reducing the SSM to the well-studied computation of a Cauchy kernel. S4 achieves strong empirical results across a diverse range of established benchmarks, including (i) 91\% accuracy on sequential CIFAR-10 with no data augmentation or auxiliary losses, on par with a larger 2-D ResNet, (ii) substantially closing the gap to Transformers on image and language modeling tasks, while performing generation 60times faster (iii) SoTA on every task from the Long Range Arena benchmark, including solving the challenging Path-X task of length 16k that all prior work fails on, while being as efficient as all competitors.

Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system. Finally, we open source all contributions described in this work, accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb.

Pre-training text representations have led to significant improvements in many areas of natural language processing. The quality of these models benefits greatly from the size of the pretraining corpora as long as its quality is preserved. In this paper, we describe an automatic pipeline to extract massive high-quality monolingual datasets from Common Crawl for a variety of languages. Our pipeline follows the data processing introduced in fastText (Mikolov et al., 2017; Grave et al., 2018), that deduplicates documents and identifies their language. We augment this pipeline with a filtering step to select documents that are close to high quality corpora like Wikipedia.

Despite significant progress in Natural Language Generation for Indian languages (IndicNLP), there is a lack of datasets around complex structured tasks such as semantic parsing. One reason for this imminent gap is the complexity of the logical form, which makes English to multilingual translation difficult. The process involves alignment of logical forms, intents and slots with translated unstructured utterance. To address this, we propose an Inter-bilingual Seq2seq Semantic parsing dataset IE-SEMPARSE for 11 distinct Indian languages. We highlight the proposed task's practicality, and evaluate existing multilingual seq2seq models across several train-test strategies. Our experiment reveals a high correlation across performance of original multilingual semantic parsing datasets (such as mTOP, multilingual TOP and multiATIS++) and our proposed IE-SEMPARSE suite.

In Brazil, the governmental body responsible for overseeing and coordinating post-graduate programs, CAPES, keeps records of all theses and dissertations presented in the country. Information regarding such documents can be accessed online in the Theses and Dissertations Catalog (TDC), which contains abstracts in Portuguese and English, and additional metadata. Thus, this database can be a potential source of parallel corpora for the Portuguese and English languages. In this article, we present the development of a parallel corpus from TDC, which is made available by CAPES under the open data initiative. Approximately 240,000 documents were collected and aligned using the Hunalign tool. We demonstrate the capability of our developed corpus by training Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for both language directions, followed by a comparison with Google Translate (GT). Both translation models presented better BLEU scores than GT, with NMT system being the most accurate one. Sentence alignment was also manually evaluated, presenting an average of 82.30% correctly aligned sentences. Our parallel corpus is freely available in TMX format, with complementary information regarding document metadata

Previous work on augmenting large multimodal models (LMMs) for text-to-image (T2I) generation has focused on enriching the input space of in-context learning (ICL). This includes providing a few demonstrations and optimizing image descriptions to be more detailed and logical. However, as demand for more complex and flexible image descriptions grows, enhancing comprehension of input text within the ICL paradigm remains a critical yet underexplored area. In this work, we extend this line of research by constructing parallel multilingual prompts aimed at harnessing the multilingual capabilities of LMMs. More specifically, we translate the input text into several languages and provide the models with both the original text and the translations. Experiments on two LMMs across 3 benchmarks show that our method, PMT2I, achieves superior performance in general, compositional, and fine-grained assessments, especially in human preference alignment. Additionally, with its advantage of generating more diverse images, PMT2I significantly outperforms baseline prompts when incorporated with reranking methods. Our code and parallel multilingual data can be found at https://github.com/takagi97/PMT2I.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advances in recent years, particularly with the emergence of Large Language Models that have achieved unprecedented performance across many tasks. However, these developments have mainly benefited a small number of high-resource languages such as English. The majority of languages still face significant challenges due to the scarcity of training data and computational resources. To address this issue, this thesis focuses on cross-lingual transfer learning, a research area aimed at leveraging data and models from high-resource languages to improve NLP performance for low-resource languages. Specifically, we focus on Sequence Labeling tasks such as Named Entity Recognition, Opinion Target Extraction, and Argument Mining. The research is structured around three main objectives: (1) advancing data-based cross-lingual transfer learning methods through improved translation and annotation projection techniques, (2) developing enhanced model-based transfer learning approaches utilizing state-of-the-art multilingual models, and (3) applying these methods to real-world problems while creating open-source resources that facilitate future research in low-resource NLP. More specifically, this thesis presents a new method to improve data-based transfer with T-Projection, a state-of-the-art annotation projection method that leverages text-to-text multilingual models and machine translation systems. T-Projection significantly outperforms previous annotation projection methods by a wide margin. For model-based transfer, we introduce a constrained decoding algorithm that enhances cross-lingual Sequence Labeling in zero-shot settings using text-to-text models. Finally, we develop Medical mT5, the first multilingual text-to-text medical model, demonstrating the practical impact of our research on real-world applications.

Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) generates translations while receiving streaming source inputs. This requires the SiMT model to learn a read/write policy, deciding when to translate and when to wait for more source input. Numerous linguistic studies indicate that audiences in SiMT scenarios have distinct preferences, such as accurate translations, simpler syntax, and no unnecessary latency. Aligning SiMT models with these human preferences is crucial to improve their performances. However, this issue still remains unexplored. Additionally, preference optimization for SiMT task is also challenging. Existing methods focus solely on optimizing the generated responses, ignoring human preferences related to latency and the optimization of read/write policy during the preference optimization phase. To address these challenges, we propose Simultaneous Preference Learning (SimulPL), a preference learning framework tailored for the SiMT task. In the SimulPL framework, we categorize SiMT human preferences into five aspects: translation quality preference, monotonicity preference, key point preference, simplicity preference, and latency preference. By leveraging the first four preferences, we construct human preference prompts to efficiently guide GPT-4/4o in generating preference data for the SiMT task. In the preference optimization phase, SimulPL integrates latency preference into the optimization objective and enables SiMT models to improve the read/write policy, thereby aligning with human preferences more effectively. Experimental results indicate that SimulPL exhibits better alignment with human preferences across all latency levels in ZhrightarrowEn, DerightarrowEn and EnrightarrowZh SiMT tasks. Our data and code will be available at https://github.com/EurekaForNLP/SimulPL.

Most legal text in the Indian judiciary is written in complex English due to historical reasons. However, only about 10% of the Indian population is comfortable in reading English. Hence legal text needs to be made available in various Indian languages, possibly by translating the available legal text from English. Though there has been a lot of research on translation to and between Indian languages, to our knowledge, there has not been much prior work on such translation in the legal domain. In this work, we construct the first high-quality legal parallel corpus containing aligned text units in English and nine Indian languages, that includes several low-resource languages. We also benchmark the performance of a wide variety of Machine Translation (MT) systems over this corpus, including commercial MT systems, open-source MT systems and Large Language Models. Through a comprehensive survey by Law practitioners, we check how satisfied they are with the translations by some of these MT systems, and how well automatic MT evaluation metrics agree with the opinions of Law practitioners.

We present a neural machine translation system that can translate between Romanian, English, and Aromanian (an endangered Eastern Romance language); the first of its kind. BLEU scores range from 17 to 32 depending on the direction and genre of the text. Alongside, we release the biggest known Aromanian-Romanian bilingual corpus, consisting of 79k cleaned sentence pairs. Additional tools such as an agnostic sentence embedder (used for both text mining and automatic evaluation) and a diacritics converter are also presented. We publicly release our findings and models. Finally, we describe the deployment of our quantized model at https://arotranslate.com.

We propose a simple solution to use a single Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to translate between multiple languages. Our solution requires no change in the model architecture from our base system but instead introduces an artificial token at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language. The rest of the model, which includes encoder, decoder and attention, remains unchanged and is shared across all languages. Using a shared wordpiece vocabulary, our approach enables Multilingual NMT using a single model without any increase in parameters, which is significantly simpler than previous proposals for Multilingual NMT. Our method often improves the translation quality of all involved language pairs, even while keeping the total number of model parameters constant. On the WMT'14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for EnglishrightarrowFrench and surpasses state-of-the-art results for EnglishrightarrowGerman. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for FrenchrightarrowEnglish and GermanrightarrowEnglish on WMT'14 and WMT'15 benchmarks respectively. On production corpora, multilingual models of up to twelve language pairs allow for better translation of many individual pairs. In addition to improving the translation quality of language pairs that the model was trained with, our models can also learn to perform implicit bridging between language pairs never seen explicitly during training, showing that transfer learning and zero-shot translation is possible for neural translation. Finally, we show analyses that hints at a universal interlingua representation in our models and show some interesting examples when mixing languages.

When the complete source sentence is provided, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform excellently in offline machine translation even with a simple prompt "Translate the following sentence from [src lang] into [tgt lang]:". However, in many real scenarios, the source tokens arrive in a streaming manner and simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is required, then the efficiency and performance of decoder-only LLMs are significantly limited by their auto-regressive nature. To enable LLMs to achieve high-quality SiMT as efficiently as offline translation, we propose a novel paradigm that includes constructing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data for SiMT, along with new training and inference strategies. To replicate the token input/output stream in SiMT, the source and target tokens are rearranged into an interleaved sequence, separated by special tokens according to varying latency requirements. This enables powerful LLMs to learn read and write operations adaptively, based on varying latency prompts, while still maintaining efficient auto-regressive decoding. Experimental results show that, even with limited SFT data, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various SiMT benchmarks, and preserves the original abilities of offline translation. Moreover, our approach generalizes well to document-level SiMT setting without requiring specific fine-tuning, even beyond the offline translation model.

We present an easy and efficient method to extend existing sentence embedding models to new languages. This allows to create multilingual versions from previously monolingual models. The training is based on the idea that a translated sentence should be mapped to the same location in the vector space as the original sentence. We use the original (monolingual) model to generate sentence embeddings for the source language and then train a new system on translated sentences to mimic the original model. Compared to other methods for training multilingual sentence embeddings, this approach has several advantages: It is easy to extend existing models with relatively few samples to new languages, it is easier to ensure desired properties for the vector space, and the hardware requirements for training is lower. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for 50+ languages from various language families. Code to extend sentence embeddings models to more than 400 languages is publicly available.

Parallel corpora play an important role in training machine translation (MT) models, particularly for low-resource languages where high-quality bilingual data is scarce. This review provides a comprehensive overview of available parallel corpora for Indic languages, which span diverse linguistic families, scripts, and regional variations. We categorize these corpora into text-to-text, code-switched, and various categories of multimodal datasets, highlighting their significance in the development of robust multilingual MT systems. Beyond resource enumeration, we critically examine the challenges faced in corpus creation, including linguistic diversity, script variation, data scarcity, and the prevalence of informal textual content.We also discuss and evaluate these corpora in various terms such as alignment quality and domain representativeness. Furthermore, we address open challenges such as data imbalance across Indic languages, the trade-off between quality and quantity, and the impact of noisy, informal, and dialectal data on MT performance. Finally, we outline future directions, including leveraging cross-lingual transfer learning, expanding multilingual datasets, and integrating multimodal resources to enhance translation quality. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first comprehensive review of parallel corpora specifically tailored for low-resource Indic languages in the context of machine translation.

Translate-test is a popular technique to improve the performance of multilingual language models. This approach works by translating the input into English using an external machine translation system, and running inference over the translated input. However, these improvements can be attributed to the use of a separate translation system, which is typically trained on large amounts of parallel data not seen by the language model. In this work, we introduce a new approach called self-translate, which overcomes the need of an external translation system by leveraging the few-shot translation capabilities of multilingual language models. Experiments over 5 tasks show that self-translate consistently outperforms direct inference, demonstrating that language models are unable to leverage their full multilingual potential when prompted in non-English languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/juletx/self-translate.

The evolving sophistication and intricacies of Large Language Models (LLMs) yield unprecedented advancements, yet they simultaneously demand considerable computational resources and incur significant costs. To alleviate these challenges, this paper introduces a novel, simple, and effective method named ``\growlength'' to accelerate the pretraining process of LLMs. Our method progressively increases the training length throughout the pretraining phase, thereby mitigating computational costs and enhancing efficiency. For instance, it begins with a sequence length of 128 and progressively extends to 4096. This approach enables models to process a larger number of tokens within limited time frames, potentially boosting their performance. In other words, the efficiency gain is derived from training with shorter sequences optimizing the utilization of resources. Our extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs have revealed that models trained using our method not only converge more swiftly but also exhibit superior performance metrics compared to those trained with existing methods. Furthermore, our method for LLMs pretraining acceleration does not require any additional engineering efforts, making it a practical solution in the realm of LLMs.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT'14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous best result on this task. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.

Much recent effort has been invested in non-autoregressive neural machine translation, which appears to be an efficient alternative to state-of-the-art autoregressive machine translation on modern GPUs. In contrast to the latter, where generation is sequential, the former allows generation to be parallelized across target token positions. Some of the latest non-autoregressive models have achieved impressive translation quality-speed tradeoffs compared to autoregressive baselines. In this work, we reexamine this tradeoff and argue that autoregressive baselines can be substantially sped up without loss in accuracy. Specifically, we study autoregressive models with encoders and decoders of varied depths. Our extensive experiments show that given a sufficiently deep encoder, a single-layer autoregressive decoder can substantially outperform strong non-autoregressive models with comparable inference speed. We show that the speed disadvantage for autoregressive baselines compared to non-autoregressive methods has been overestimated in three aspects: suboptimal layer allocation, insufficient speed measurement, and lack of knowledge distillation. Our results establish a new protocol for future research toward fast, accurate machine translation. Our code is available at https://github.com/jungokasai/deep-shallow.

Large language models (LLMs) have exerted a considerable impact on diverse language-related tasks in recent years. Their demonstrated state-of-the-art performance is achieved through methodologies such as zero-shot or few-shot prompting. These models undergo training on extensive datasets that encompass segments of the Internet and subsequently undergo fine-tuning tailored to specific tasks. Notably, they exhibit proficiency in tasks such as translation, summarization, question answering, and creative writing, even in the absence of explicit training for those particular tasks. While they have shown substantial improvement in the multilingual tasks their performance in the code switching, especially for machine translation remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we present an extensive study on the code switching task specifically for the machine translation task comparing multiple LLMs. Our results indicate that despite the LLMs having promising results in the certain tasks, the models with relatively lesser complexity outperform the multilingual large language models in the machine translation task. We posit that the efficacy of multilingual large language models in contextual code switching is constrained by their training methodologies. In contrast, relatively smaller models, when trained and fine-tuned on bespoke datasets, may yield superior results in comparison to the majority of multilingual models.

This paper discusses the methods that we used for our submissions to the WMT 2023 Terminology Shared Task for German-to-English (DE-EN), English-to-Czech (EN-CS), and Chinese-to-English (ZH-EN) language pairs. The task aims to advance machine translation (MT) by challenging participants to develop systems that accurately translate technical terms, ultimately enhancing communication and understanding in specialised domains. To this end, we conduct experiments that utilise large language models (LLMs) for two purposes: generating synthetic bilingual terminology-based data, and post-editing translations generated by an MT model through incorporating pre-approved terms. Our system employs a four-step process: (i) using an LLM to generate bilingual synthetic data based on the provided terminology, (ii) fine-tuning a generic encoder-decoder MT model, with a mix of the terminology-based synthetic data generated in the first step and a randomly sampled portion of the original generic training data, (iii) generating translations with the fine-tuned MT model, and (iv) finally, leveraging an LLM for terminology-constrained automatic post-editing of the translations that do not include the required terms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in improving the integration of pre-approved terms into translations. The number of terms incorporated into the translations of the blind dataset increases from an average of 36.67% with the generic model to an average of 72.88% by the end of the process. In other words, successful utilisation of terms nearly doubles across the three language pairs.

Automatic evaluation on low-resource language translation suffers from a deficiency of parallel corpora. Round-trip translation could be served as a clever and straightforward technique to alleviate the requirement of the parallel evaluation corpus. However, there was an observation of obscure correlations between the evaluation scores by forward and round-trip translations in the era of statistical machine translation (SMT). In this paper, we report the surprising finding that round-trip translation can be used for automatic evaluation without the references. Firstly, our revisit on the round-trip translation in SMT evaluation unveils that its long-standing misunderstanding is essentially caused by copying mechanism. After removing copying mechanism in SMT, round-trip translation scores can appropriately reflect the forward translation performance. Then, we demonstrate the rectification is overdue as round-trip translation could benefit multiple machine translation evaluation tasks. To be more specific, round-trip translation could be used i) to predict corresponding forward translation scores; ii) to improve the performance of the recently advanced quality estimation model; and iii) to identify adversarial competitors in shared tasks via cross-system verification.

The development of generative language models that can create long and coherent textual outputs via autoregression has lead to a proliferation of uses and a corresponding sweep of analyses as researches work to determine the limitations of this new paradigm. Unlike humans, these 'Large Language Models' (LLMs) are highly sensitive to small changes in their inputs, leading to unwanted inconsistency in their behavior. One problematic inconsistency when LLMs are used to answer multiple-choice questions or analyze multiple inputs is order dependency: the output of an LLM can (and often does) change significantly when sub-sequences are swapped, despite both orderings being semantically identical. In this paper we present , a technique that guarantees the output of an LLM will not have order dependence on a specified set of sub-sequences. We show that this method provably eliminates order dependency, and that it can be applied to any transformer-based LLM to enable text generation that is unaffected by re-orderings. Delving into the implications of our method, we show that, despite our inputs being out of distribution, the impact on expected accuracy is small, where the expectation is over the order of uniformly chosen shuffling of the candidate responses, and usually significantly less in practice. Thus, can be used as a 'dropped-in' method on fully trained models. Finally, we discuss how our method's success suggests that other strong guarantees can be obtained on LLM performance via modifying the input representations.

In its daily use, the Indonesian language is riddled with informality, that is, deviations from the standard in terms of vocabulary, spelling, and word order. On the other hand, current available Indonesian NLP models are typically developed with the standard Indonesian in mind. In this work, we address a style-transfer from informal to formal Indonesian as a low-resource machine translation problem. We build a new dataset of parallel sentences of informal Indonesian and its formal counterpart. We benchmark several strategies to perform style transfer from informal to formal Indonesian. We also explore augmenting the training set with artificial forward-translated data. Since we are dealing with an extremely low-resource setting, we find that a phrase-based machine translation approach outperforms the Transformer-based approach. Alternatively, a pre-trained GPT-2 fined-tuned to this task performed equally well but costs more computational resource. Our findings show a promising step towards leveraging machine translation models for style transfer. Our code and data are available in https://github.com/haryoa/stif-indonesia

Recent advances in the pre-training of language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these datasets. This is primarily because many widely spoken languages are not well represented on the web and therefore excluded from the large-scale crawls used to create datasets. Furthermore, downstream users of these models are restricted to the selection of languages originally chosen for pre-training. This work investigates how to optimally leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. We focus on two questions: 1) How can pre-trained models be used for languages not included in the initial pre-training? and 2) How can the resulting translation models effectively transfer to new domains? To answer these questions, we create a new African news corpus covering 16 languages, of which eight languages are not part of any existing evaluation dataset. We demonstrate that the most effective strategy for transferring both to additional languages and to additional domains is to fine-tune large pre-trained models on small quantities of high-quality translation data.

This paper addresses the challenges translating case law under Hong Kong's bilingual legal system. It highlights the initial success of translating all written statutes into Chinese before the 1997 handover, a task mandated by the Basic Law. The effort involved significant collaboration among legal, linguistic, and translation experts, resulting in a comprehensive and culturally appropriate bilingual legal system. However, translating case law remains a significant challenge due to the sheer volume and continuous growth of judicial decisions. The paper critiques the governments and judiciarys sporadic and uncoordinated efforts to translate case law, contrasting it with the thorough approach previously taken for statute translation. Although the government acknowledges the importance of legal bilingualism, it lacks a sustainable strategy for translating case law. The Judiciarys position that translating all judgments is unnecessary, unrealistic, and not cost-effectiveis analyzed and critiqued for its impact on legal transparency and public trust. A proposed solution involves leveraging machine translation technology through a human-machine interactive translation platform, which undergoes two major transitions. Initially based on a neural model, the platform transitions to using a large language model for improved translation accuracy. Furthermore, it evolves from a single-agent system to a multi-agent system, incorporating Translator, Annotator, and Proofreader agents. This multi-agent approach, supported by a grant, aims to facilitate efficient, high-quality translation of judicial judgments by integrating advanced artificial intelligence and continuous feedback mechanisms, thus better meeting the needs of a bilingual legal system.

Recent work attributes progress in NLP to large language models (LMs) with increased model size and large quantities of pretraining data. Despite this, current state-of-the-art LMs for Hebrew are both under-parameterized and under-trained compared to LMs in other languages. Additionally, previous work on pretrained Hebrew LMs focused on encoder-only models. While the encoder-only architecture is beneficial for classification tasks, it does not cater well for sub-word prediction tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition, when considering the morphologically rich nature of Hebrew. In this paper we argue that sequence-to-sequence generative architectures are more suitable for LLMs in the case of morphologically rich languages (MRLs) such as Hebrew. We demonstrate that by casting tasks in the Hebrew NLP pipeline as text-to-text tasks, we can leverage powerful multilingual, pretrained sequence-to-sequence models as mT5, eliminating the need for a specialized, morpheme-based, separately fine-tuned decoder. Using this approach, our experiments show substantial improvements over previously published results on existing Hebrew NLP benchmarks. These results suggest that multilingual sequence-to-sequence models present a promising building block for NLP for MRLs.

This paper describes our submission to the shared task on word/phrase level Quality Estimation (QE) in the First Conference on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT16). The objective of the shared task was to predict if the given word/phrase is a correct/incorrect (OK/BAD) translation in the given sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for word level Quality Estimation using Recurrent Neural Network Language Model (RNN-LM) architecture. RNN-LMs have been found very effective in different Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. RNN-LM is mainly used for vector space language modeling for different NLP problems. For this task, we modify the architecture of RNN-LM. The modified system predicts a label (OK/BAD) in the slot rather than predicting the word. The input to the system is a word sequence, similar to the standard RNN-LM. The approach is language independent and requires only the translated text for QE. To estimate the phrase level quality, we use the output of the word level QE system.

It is very challenging to work with low-resource languages due to the inadequate availability of data. Using a dictionary to map independently trained word embeddings into a shared vector space has proved to be very useful in learning bilingual embeddings in the past. Here we have tried to map individual embeddings of words in English and their corresponding translated words in low-resource languages like Estonian, Slovenian, Slovakian, and Hungarian. We have used a supervised learning approach. We report accuracy scores through various retrieval strategies which show that it is possible to approach challenging tasks in Natural Language Processing like machine translation for such languages, provided that we have at least some amount of proper bilingual data. We also conclude that we can follow an unsupervised learning path on monolingual text data as that is more suitable for low-resource languages.

We introduce KazParC, a parallel corpus designed for machine translation across Kazakh, English, Russian, and Turkish. The first and largest publicly available corpus of its kind, KazParC contains a collection of 371,902 parallel sentences covering different domains and developed with the assistance of human translators. Our research efforts also extend to the development of a neural machine translation model nicknamed Tilmash. Remarkably, the performance of Tilmash is on par with, and in certain instances, surpasses that of industry giants, such as Google Translate and Yandex Translate, as measured by standard evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and chrF. Both KazParC and Tilmash are openly available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.

Several recent works have suggested to represent semantic relations with questions and answers, decomposing textual information into separate interrogative natural language statements. In this paper, we consider three QA-based semantic tasks - namely, QA-SRL, QANom and QADiscourse, each targeting a certain type of predication - and propose to regard them as jointly providing a comprehensive representation of textual information. To promote this goal, we investigate how to best utilize the power of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-trained language models, within the unique setup of semi-structured outputs, consisting of an unordered set of question-answer pairs. We examine different input and output linearization strategies, and assess the effect of multitask learning and of simple data augmentation techniques in the setting of imbalanced training data. Consequently, we release the first unified QASem parsing tool, practical for downstream applications who can benefit from an explicit, QA-based account of information units in a text.

Despite the rise of recent neural networks in machine translation, those networks do not work well if the training data is insufficient. In this paper, we proposed an approach for machine translation in low-resource languages such as Vietnamese-Chinese. Our proposed method leveraged the power of the multilingual pre-trained language model (mBART) and both Vietnamese and Chinese monolingual corpus. Firstly, we built an early bird machine translation model using the bilingual training dataset. Secondly, we used TF-IDF technique to select sentences from the monolingual corpus which are the most related to domains of the parallel dataset. Finally, the first model was used to synthesize the augmented training data from the selected monolingual corpus for the translation model. Our proposed scheme showed that it outperformed 8% compared to the transformer model. The augmented dataset also pushed the model performance.

Multilingual language models have pushed state-of-the-art in cross-lingual NLP transfer. The majority of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, however, use one and the same massively multilingual transformer (e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to transfer to all target languages, irrespective of their typological, etymological, and phylogenetic relations to other languages. In particular, readily available data and models of resource-rich sibling languages are often ignored. In this work, we empirically show, in a case study for Faroese -- a low-resource language from a high-resource language family -- that by leveraging the phylogenetic information and departing from the 'one-size-fits-all' paradigm, one can improve cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. In particular, we leverage abundant resources of other Scandinavian languages (i.e., Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic) for the benefit of Faroese. Our evaluation results show that we can substantially improve the transfer performance to Faroese by exploiting data and models of closely-related high-resource languages. Further, we release a new web corpus of Faroese and Faroese datasets for named entity recognition (NER), semantic text similarity (STS), and new language models trained on all Scandinavian languages.

Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models with attention have excelled at tasks which involve generating natural language sentences such as machine translation, image captioning and speech recognition. Performance has further been improved by leveraging unlabeled data, often in the form of a language model. In this work, we present the Cold Fusion method, which leverages a pre-trained language model during training, and show its effectiveness on the speech recognition task. We show that Seq2Seq models with Cold Fusion are able to better utilize language information enjoying i) faster convergence and better generalization, and ii) almost complete transfer to a new domain while using less than 10% of the labeled training data.

In this report, we introduce Hunyuan-MT-7B, our first open-source multilingual translation model, which supports bidirectional translation across 33 major languages and places a special emphasis on translation between Mandarin and several ethnic minority languages as well as dialects. Furthermore, to serve and address diverse translation scenarios and enhance model performance at test time, we introduce Hunyuan-MT-Chimera-7B, a translation model inspired by the slow thinking mode. This model integrates multiple outputs generated by the Hunyuan-MT-7B model under varying parameter settings, thereby achieving performance superior to that of conventional slow-thinking models based on Chain-of-Thought (CoT). The development of our models follows a holistic training process specifically engineered for multilingual translation, which begins with general and MT-oriented pre-training to build foundational capabilities, proceeds to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for task-specific adaptation, and culminates in advanced alignment through Reinforcement Learning (RL) and weak-to-strong RL. Through comprehensive experimentation, we demonstrate that both Hunyuan-MT-7B and Hunyuan-MT-Chimera-7B significantly outperform all translation-specific models of comparable parameter size and most of the SOTA large models, particularly on the task of translation between Mandarin and minority languages as well as dialects. In the WMT2025 shared task (General Machine Translation), our models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, ranking first in 30 out of 31 language pairs. This result highlights the robustness of our models across a diverse linguistic spectrum, encompassing high-resource languages such as Chinese, English, and Japanese, as well as low-resource languages including Czech, Marathi, Estonian, and Icelandic.

We introduce the first open-source model for translation between the vulnerable Chechen language and Russian, and the dataset collected to train and evaluate it. We explore fine-tuning capabilities for including a new language into a large language model system for multilingual translation NLLB-200. The BLEU / ChrF++ scores for our model are 8.34 / 34.69 and 20.89 / 44.55 for translation from Russian to Chechen and reverse direction, respectively. The release of the translation models is accompanied by the distribution of parallel words, phrases and sentences corpora and multilingual sentence encoder adapted to the Chechen language.

Document-level machine translation leverages inter-sentence dependencies to produce more coherent and consistent translations. However, these models, predominantly based on transformers, are difficult to scale to long documents as their attention layers have quadratic complexity in the sequence length. Recent efforts on efficient attention improve scalability, but their effect on document translation remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of a recent linear attention model by Peng et al. (2021) on document translation and augment it with a sentential gate to promote a recency inductive bias. We evaluate the model on IWSLT 2015 and OpenSubtitles 2018 against the transformer, demonstrating substantially increased decoding speed on long sequences with similar or better BLEU scores. We show that sentential gating further improves translation quality on IWSLT.

The training paradigm for machine translation has gradually shifted, from learning neural machine translation (NMT) models with extensive parallel corpora to instruction finetuning on pretrained multilingual large language models (LLMs) with high-quality translation pairs. In this paper, we focus on boosting the many-to-many multilingual translation performance of LLMs with an emphasis on zero-shot translation directions. We demonstrate that prompt strategies adopted during instruction finetuning are crucial to zero-shot translation performance and introduce a cross-lingual consistency regularization, XConST, to bridge the representation gap among different languages and improve zero-shot translation performance. XConST is not a new method, but a version of CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023a) adapted for multilingual finetuning on LLMs with translation instructions. Experimental results on ALMA (Xu et al., 2023) and LLaMA-2 (Touvron et al., 2023) show that our approach consistently improves translation performance. Our implementations are available at https://github.com/gpengzhi/CrossConST-LLM.

Recent studies on AMR-to-text generation often formalize the task as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning problem by converting an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph into a word sequence. Graph structures are further modeled into the seq2seq framework in order to utilize the structural information in the AMR graphs. However, previous approaches only consider the relations between directly connected concepts while ignoring the rich structure in AMR graphs. In this paper we eliminate such a strong limitation and propose a novel structure-aware self-attention approach to better modeling the relations between indirectly connected concepts in the state-of-the-art seq2seq model, i.e., the Transformer. In particular, a few different methods are explored to learn structural representations between two concepts. Experimental results on English AMR benchmark datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art with 29.66 and 31.82 BLEU scores on LDC2015E86 and LDC2017T10, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best results achieved so far by supervised models on the benchmarks.

The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine translation relies heavily on the abilities of language understanding and generation. Thus, in this paper, we explore how to assist machine translation with ChatGPT. We adopt several translation prompts on a wide range of translations. Our experimental results show that ChatGPT with designed translation prompts can achieve comparable or better performance over commercial translation systems for high-resource language translations. We further evaluate the translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT achieves superior performance compared to commercial systems. We also conduct experiments on domain-specific translations, the final results show that ChatGPT is able to comprehend the provided domain keyword and adjust accordingly to output proper translations. At last, we perform few-shot prompts that show consistent improvement across different base prompts. Our work provides empirical evidence that ChatGPT still has great potential in translations.

In this work, we propose and evaluate the feasibility of a two-stage pipeline to evaluate literary machine translation, in a fine-grained manner, from English to Korean. The results show that our framework provides fine-grained, interpretable metrics suited for literary translation and obtains a higher correlation with human judgment than traditional machine translation metrics. Nonetheless, it still fails to match inter-human agreement, especially in metrics like Korean Honorifics. We also observe that LLMs tend to favor translations generated by other LLMs, and we highlight the necessity of developing more sophisticated evaluation methods to ensure accurate and culturally sensitive machine translation of literary works.

Given the great success of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks, in this paper, we introduce LLM-ST, a novel and effective speech translation model constructed upon a pre-trained LLM. By integrating the large language model (LLM) with a speech encoder and employing multi-task instruction tuning, LLM-ST can produce accurate timestamped transcriptions and translations, even from long audio inputs. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the implementation of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can yield advantages in the context of LLM-ST. Through rigorous experimentation on English and Chinese datasets, we showcase the exceptional performance of LLM-ST, establishing a new benchmark in the field of speech translation. Demo: https://speechtranslation.github.io/llm-st/.

Currently, in speech translation, the straightforward approach - cascading a recognition system with a translation system - delivers state-of-the-art results. However, fundamental challenges such as error propagation from the automatic speech recognition system still remain. To mitigate these problems, recently, people turn their attention to direct data and propose various joint training methods. In this work, we seek to answer the question of whether joint training really helps cascaded speech translation. We review recent papers on the topic and also investigate a joint training criterion by marginalizing the transcription posterior probabilities. Our findings show that a strong cascaded baseline can diminish any improvements obtained using joint training, and we suggest alternatives to joint training. We hope this work can serve as a refresher of the current speech translation landscape, and motivate research in finding more efficient and creative ways to utilize the direct data for speech translation.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for open-domain NLP tasks. However, LLMs are sometimes too footloose for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks which always have restricted output and input format. Their performances on NLU tasks are highly related to prompts or demonstrations and are shown to be poor at performing several representative NLU tasks, such as event extraction and entity typing. To this end, we present SeqGPT, a bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) open-source autoregressive model specially enhanced for open-domain natural language understanding. We express all NLU tasks with two atomic tasks, which define fixed instructions to restrict the input and output format but still ``open'' for arbitrarily varied label sets. The model is first instruction-tuned with extremely fine-grained labeled data synthesized by ChatGPT and then further fine-tuned by 233 different atomic tasks from 152 datasets across various domains. The experimental results show that SeqGPT has decent classification and extraction ability, and is capable of performing language understanding tasks on unseen domains. We also conduct empirical studies on the scaling of data and model size as well as on the transfer across tasks. Our model is accessible at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/SeqGPT.

This paper describes the FBK's participation in the Simultaneous Translation and Automatic Subtitling tracks of the IWSLT 2023 Evaluation Campaign. Our submission focused on the use of direct architectures to perform both tasks: for the simultaneous one, we leveraged the knowledge already acquired by offline-trained models and directly applied a policy to obtain the real-time inference; for the subtitling one, we adapted the direct ST model to produce well-formed subtitles and exploited the same architecture to produce timestamps needed for the subtitle synchronization with audiovisual content. Our English-German SimulST system shows a reduced computational-aware latency compared to the one achieved by the top-ranked systems in the 2021 and 2022 rounds of the task, with gains of up to 3.5 BLEU. Our automatic subtitling system outperforms the only existing solution based on a direct system by 3.7 and 1.7 SubER in English-German and English-Spanish respectively.

When completing knowledge-intensive tasks, humans sometimes need not just an answer but also a corresponding reference passage for auxiliary reading. Previous methods required obtaining pre-segmented article chunks through additional retrieval models. This paper explores leveraging the parameterized knowledge stored during the pre-training phase of large language models (LLMs) to independently recall reference passage from any starting position. We propose a two-stage framework that simulates the scenario of humans recalling easily forgotten references. Initially, the LLM is prompted to recall document title identifiers to obtain a coarse-grained document set. Then, based on the acquired coarse-grained document set, it recalls fine-grained passage. In the two-stage recall process, we use constrained decoding to ensure that content outside of the stored documents is not generated. To increase speed, we only recall a short prefix in the second stage, then locate its position to retrieve a complete passage. Experiments on KILT knowledge-sensitive tasks have verified that LLMs can independently recall reference passage location in various task forms, and the obtained reference significantly assist downstream tasks.

We show how to derive state-of-the-art unsupervised neural machine translation systems from generatively pre-trained language models. Our method consists of three steps: few-shot amplification, distillation, and backtranslation. We first use the zero-shot translation ability of large pre-trained language models to generate translations for a small set of unlabeled sentences. We then amplify these zero-shot translations by using them as few-shot demonstrations for sampling a larger synthetic dataset. This dataset is distilled by discarding the few-shot demonstrations and then fine-tuning. During backtranslation, we repeatedly generate translations for a set of inputs and then fine-tune a single language model on both directions of the translation task at once, ensuring cycle-consistency by swapping the roles of gold monotext and generated translations when fine-tuning. By using our method to leverage GPT-3's zero-shot translation capability, we achieve a new state-of-the-art in unsupervised translation on the WMT14 English-French benchmark, attaining a BLEU score of 42.1.

In this work, we demonstrate that multilingual large-scale sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, pre-trained on a mixture of denoising and Causal Language Modeling (CLM) tasks, are more efficient few-shot learners than decoder-only models on various tasks. In particular, we train a 20 billion parameter multilingual seq2seq model called Alexa Teacher Model (AlexaTM 20B) and show that it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 1-shot summarization tasks, outperforming a much larger 540B PaLM decoder model. AlexaTM 20B also achieves SOTA in 1-shot machine translation, especially for low-resource languages, across almost all language pairs supported by the model (Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Marathi, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, and Telugu) on Flores-101 dataset. We also show in zero-shot setting, AlexaTM 20B outperforms GPT3 (175B) on SuperGLUE and SQuADv2 datasets and provides SOTA performance on multilingual tasks such as XNLI, XCOPA, Paws-X, and XWinograd. Overall, our results present a compelling case for seq2seq models as a powerful alternative to decoder-only models for Large-scale Language Model (LLM) training.

Despite recent breakthroughs in reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) like DeepSeek-R1, incorporating inference-time reasoning into machine translation (MT), where human translators naturally employ structured, multi-layered reasoning chain-of-thoughts (CoTs), is yet underexplored. Existing methods either design a fixed CoT tailored for a specific MT sub-task (e.g., literature translation), or rely on synthesizing CoTs unaligned with humans and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) prone to catastrophic forgetting, limiting their adaptability to diverse translation scenarios. This paper introduces R1-Translator (R1-T1), a novel framework to achieve inference-time reasoning for general MT via reinforcement learning (RL) with human-aligned CoTs comprising six common patterns. Our approach pioneers three innovations: (1) extending reasoning-based translation beyond MT sub-tasks to six languages and diverse tasks (e.g., legal/medical domain adaptation, idiom resolution); (2) formalizing six expert-curated CoT templates that mirror hybrid human strategies like context-aware paraphrasing and back translation; and (3) enabling self-evolving CoT discovery and anti-forgetting adaptation through RL with KL-constrained rewards. Experimental results indicate a steady translation performance improvement in 21 languages and 80 translation directions on Flores-101 test set, especially on the 15 languages unseen from training, with its general multilingual abilities preserved compared with plain SFT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) present strong general capabilities, and a current compelling challenge is stimulating their specialized capabilities, such as machine translation, through low-cost instruction tuning. The standard instruction-following data is sequentially organized as the concatenation of an instruction, an input, and a response. As the attention mechanism of LLMs has limitations on local focus, LLMs tend to focus more on the words or sentences nearby at each position. This leads to a high risk of instruction forgetting during decoding. To alleviate the above issues, We propose SWIE (Segment-Weighted Instruction Embedding) and an instruction-following dataset OVERMISS. SWIE improves the model instruction understanding by adding a global instruction representation on the following input and response representations. OVERMISS improves model faithfulness by comparing over-translation and miss-translation results with the correct translation. We apply our methods to two main-stream open-source LLMs, BLOOM and LLaMA. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in translation performance with SWIE based on BLOOMZ-3b, particularly in zero-shot and long text translations due to reduced instruction forgetting risk. Additionally, OVERMISS outperforms the baseline in translation performance (e.g. an increase in BLEU scores from 0.69 to 3.12 and an average improvement of 0.48 percentage comet scores for LLaMA-7b) with further enhancements seen in models combining OVERMISS and SWIE (e.g. the BLUE scores increase up to 0.56 from English to German across three different backbones), and both exhibit improvements in the faithfulness metric based on word alignment.

We present an ongoing initiative to provide open, very large, high-quality, and richly annotated textual datasets for almost 200 languages. At 30 trillion tokens, this is likely the largest generally available multilingual collection of LLM pre-training data. These datasets are derived from web crawls from different sources and accompanied with a complete, open-source pipeline for document selection from web archives, text extraction from HTML, language identification for noisy texts, exact and near-deduplication, annotation with, among others, register labels, text quality estimates, and personally identifiable information; and final selection and filtering. We report on data quality probes through contrastive and analytical statistics, through manual inspection of samples for 24 languages, and through end-to-end evaluation of various language model architectures trained on this data. For multilingual LLM evaluation, we provide a comprehensive collection of benchmarks for nine European languages, with special emphasis on natively created tasks, mechanisms to mitigate prompt sensitivity, and refined normalization and aggregation of scores. Additionally, we train and evaluate a family of 57 monolingual encoder-decoder models, as well as a handful of monolingual GPT-like reference models. Besides the monolingual data and models, we also present a very large collection of parallel texts automatically mined from this data, together with a novel parallel corpus synthesized via machine translation.

Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown strong abilities in multilingual translations, without being explicitly trained on parallel corpora. It is interesting how the LLMs obtain their ability to carry out translation instructions for different languages. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis by finetuning a multilingual pretrained language model, XGLM-7B, to perform multilingual translation following given instructions. Firstly, we show that multilingual LLMs have stronger translation abilities than previously demonstrated. For a certain language, the performance depends on its similarity to English and the amount of data used in the pretraining phase. Secondly, we find that LLMs' ability to carry out translation instructions relies on the understanding of translation instructions and the alignment among different languages. With multilingual finetuning, LLMs could learn to perform the translation task well even for those language pairs unseen during the instruction tuning phase.

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is a demanding task that involves generating translations in real-time while continuously processing speech input. This paper offers a comprehensive overview of the recent developments in SimulST research, focusing on four major challenges. Firstly, the complexities associated with processing lengthy and continuous speech streams pose significant hurdles. Secondly, satisfying real-time requirements presents inherent difficulties due to the need for immediate translation output. Thirdly, striking a balance between translation quality and latency constraints remains a critical challenge. Finally, the scarcity of annotated data adds another layer of complexity to the task. Through our exploration of these challenges and the proposed solutions, we aim to provide valuable insights into the current landscape of SimulST research and suggest promising directions for future exploration.

What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems that perform translation progressively, putting high-performing unified systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T, a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations. Filtered and combined with human-labeled and pseudo-labeled data, we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On FLEURS, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous SOTA in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks compared to the current SOTA model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Finally, all contributions in this work are open-sourced and accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication

This paper demonstrates that multilingual denoising pre-training produces significant performance gains across a wide variety of machine translation (MT) tasks. We present mBART -- a sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder pre-trained on large-scale monolingual corpora in many languages using the BART objective. mBART is one of the first methods for pre-training a complete sequence-to-sequence model by denoising full texts in multiple languages, while previous approaches have focused only on the encoder, decoder, or reconstructing parts of the text. Pre-training a complete model allows it to be directly fine tuned for supervised (both sentence-level and document-level) and unsupervised machine translation, with no task-specific modifications. We demonstrate that adding mBART initialization produces performance gains in all but the highest-resource settings, including up to 12 BLEU points for low resource MT and over 5 BLEU points for many document-level and unsupervised models. We also show it also enables new types of transfer to language pairs with no bi-text or that were not in the pre-training corpus, and present extensive analysis of which factors contribute the most to effective pre-training.

In Indonesia, local languages play an integral role in the culture. However, the available Indonesian language resources still fall into the category of limited data in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. This is become problematic when build NLP model for these languages. To address this gap, we introduce Bhinneka Korpus, a multilingual parallel corpus featuring five Indonesian local languages. Our goal is to enhance access and utilization of these resources, extending their reach within the country. We explained in a detail the dataset collection process and associated challenges. Additionally, we experimented with translation task using the IBM Model 1 due to data constraints. The result showed that the performance of each language already shows good indications for further development. Challenges such as lexical variation, smoothing effects, and cross-linguistic variability are discussed. We intend to evaluate the corpus using advanced NLP techniques for low-resource languages, paving the way for multilingual translation models.

Translating training data into many languages has emerged as a practical solution for improving cross-lingual transfer. For tasks that involve span-level annotations, such as information extraction or question answering, an additional label projection step is required to map annotated spans onto the translated texts. Recently, a few efforts have utilized a simple mark-then-translate method to jointly perform translation and projection by inserting special markers around the labeled spans in the original sentence. However, as far as we are aware, no empirical analysis has been conducted on how this approach compares to traditional annotation projection based on word alignment. In this paper, we present an extensive empirical study across 57 languages and three tasks (QA, NER, and Event Extraction) to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of both methods, filling an important gap in the literature. Experimental results show that our optimized version of mark-then-translate, which we call EasyProject, is easily applied to many languages and works surprisingly well, outperforming the more complex word alignment-based methods. We analyze several key factors that affect the end-task performance, and show EasyProject works well because it can accurately preserve label span boundaries after translation. We will publicly release all our code and data.

The evolution of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been significantly influenced by six core challenges (Koehn and Knowles, 2017), which have acted as benchmarks for progress in this field. This study revisits these challenges, offering insights into their ongoing relevance in the context of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs): domain mismatch, amount of parallel data, rare word prediction, translation of long sentences, attention model as word alignment, and sub-optimal beam search. Our empirical findings indicate that LLMs effectively lessen the reliance on parallel data for major languages in the pretraining phase. Additionally, the LLM-based translation system significantly enhances the translation of long sentences that contain approximately 80 words and shows the capability to translate documents of up to 512 words. However, despite these significant improvements, the challenges of domain mismatch and prediction of rare words persist. While the challenges of word alignment and beam search, specifically associated with NMT, may not apply to LLMs, we identify three new challenges for LLMs in translation tasks: inference efficiency, translation of low-resource languages in the pretraining phase, and human-aligned evaluation. The datasets and models are released at https://github.com/pangjh3/LLM4MT.

Efficiently and accurately translating a corpus into a low-resource language remains a challenge, regardless of the strategies employed, whether manual, automated, or a combination of the two. Many Christian organizations are dedicated to the task of translating the Holy Bible into languages that lack a modern translation. Bible translation (BT) work is currently underway for over 3000 extremely low resource languages. We introduce the eBible corpus: a dataset containing 1009 translations of portions of the Bible with data in 833 different languages across 75 language families. In addition to a BT benchmarking dataset, we introduce model performance benchmarks built on the No Language Left Behind (NLLB) neural machine translation (NMT) models. Finally, we describe several problems specific to the domain of BT and consider how the established data and model benchmarks might be used for future translation efforts. For a BT task trained with NLLB, Austronesian and Trans-New Guinea language families achieve 35.1 and 31.6 BLEU scores respectively, which spurs future innovations for NMT for low-resource languages in Papua New Guinea.

Simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST) translates source-language speech into target-language text concurrently with the speaker's speech, ensuring low latency for better user comprehension. Despite its intended application to unbounded speech, most research has focused on human pre-segmented speech, simplifying the task and overlooking significant challenges. This narrow focus, coupled with widespread terminological inconsistencies, is limiting the applicability of research outcomes to real-world applications, ultimately hindering progress in the field. Our extensive literature review of 110 papers not only reveals these critical issues in current research but also serves as the foundation for our key contributions. We 1) define the steps and core components of a SimulST system, proposing a standardized terminology and taxonomy; 2) conduct a thorough analysis of community trends, and 3) offer concrete recommendations and future directions to bridge the gaps in existing literature, from evaluation frameworks to system architectures, for advancing the field towards more realistic and effective SimulST solutions.

In this paper, we investigate building a sequence to sequence architecture for motion to language translation and synchronization. The aim is to translate motion capture inputs into English natural-language descriptions, such that the descriptions are generated synchronously with the actions performed, enabling semantic segmentation as a byproduct, but without requiring synchronized training data. We propose a new recurrent formulation of local attention that is suited for synchronous/live text generation, as well as an improved motion encoder architecture better suited to smaller data and for synchronous generation. We evaluate both contributions in individual experiments, using the standard BLEU4 metric, as well as a simple semantic equivalence measure, on the KIT motion language dataset. In a follow-up experiment, we assess the quality of the synchronization of generated text in our proposed approaches through multiple evaluation metrics. We find that both contributions to the attention mechanism and the encoder architecture additively improve the quality of generated text (BLEU and semantic equivalence), but also of synchronization. Our code is available at https://github.com/rd20karim/M2T-Segmentation/tree/main

Recent studies have shown that post-aligning multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) using alignment objectives on both original and transliterated data can improve crosslingual alignment. This improvement further leads to better crosslingual transfer performance. However, it remains unclear how and why a better crosslingual alignment is achieved, as this technique only involves transliterations, and does not use any parallel data. This paper attempts to explicitly evaluate the crosslingual alignment and identify the key elements in transliteration-based approaches that contribute to better performance. For this, we train multiple models under varying setups for two pairs of related languages: (1) Polish and Ukrainian and (2) Hindi and Urdu. To assess alignment, we define four types of similarities based on sentence representations. Our experiments show that adding transliterations alone improves the overall similarities, even for random sentence pairs. With the help of auxiliary alignment objectives, especially the contrastive objective, the model learns to distinguish matched from random pairs, leading to better alignments. However, we also show that better alignment does not always yield better downstream performance, suggesting that further research is needed to clarify the connection between alignment and performance.

The importance of qualitative parallel data in machine translation has long been determined but it has always been very difficult to obtain such in sufficient quantity for the majority of world languages, mainly because of the associated cost and also the lack of accessibility to these languages. Despite the potential for obtaining parallel datasets from online articles using automatic approaches, forensic investigations have found a lot of quality-related issues such as misalignment, and wrong language codes. In this work, we present a simple but qualitative parallel sentence aligner that carefully leveraged the closed-access Cohere multilingual embedding, a solution that ranked second in the just concluded #CoHereAIHack 2023 Challenge (see https://ai6lagos.devpost.com). The proposed approach achieved 94.96 and 54.83 f1 scores on FLORES and MAFAND-MT, compared to 3.64 and 0.64 of LASER respectively. Our method also achieved an improvement of more than 5 BLEU scores over LASER, when the resulting datasets were used with MAFAND-MT dataset to train translation models. Our code and data are available for research purposes here (https://github.com/abumafrim/Cohere-Align).

This work proposes a novel adaptation of a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model to the task of document ranking. Our approach is fundamentally different from a commonly-adopted classification-based formulation of ranking, based on encoder-only pretrained transformer architectures such as BERT. We show how a sequence-to-sequence model can be trained to generate relevance labels as "target words", and how the underlying logits of these target words can be interpreted as relevance probabilities for ranking. On the popular MS MARCO passage ranking task, experimental results show that our approach is at least on par with previous classification-based models and can surpass them with larger, more-recent models. On the test collection from the TREC 2004 Robust Track, we demonstrate a zero-shot transfer-based approach that outperforms previous state-of-the-art models requiring in-dataset cross-validation. Furthermore, we find that our approach significantly outperforms an encoder-only model in a data-poor regime (i.e., with few training examples). We investigate this observation further by varying target words to probe the model's use of latent knowledge.

Recent studies have demonstrated the cross-lingual alignment ability of multilingual pretrained language models. In this work, we found that the cross-lingual alignment can be further improved by training seq2seq models on sentence pairs mined using their own encoder outputs. We utilized these findings to develop a new approach -- cross-lingual retrieval for iterative self-supervised training (CRISS), where mining and training processes are applied iteratively, improving cross-lingual alignment and translation ability at the same time. Using this method, we achieved state-of-the-art unsupervised machine translation results on 9 language directions with an average improvement of 2.4 BLEU, and on the Tatoeba sentence retrieval task in the XTREME benchmark on 16 languages with an average improvement of 21.5% in absolute accuracy. Furthermore, CRISS also brings an additional 1.8 BLEU improvement on average compared to mBART, when finetuned on supervised machine translation downstream tasks.

Sequence-to-sequence models have recently gained the state of the art performance in summarization. However, not too many large-scale high-quality datasets are available and almost all the available ones are mainly news articles with specific writing style. Moreover, abstractive human-style systems involving description of the content at a deeper level require data with higher levels of abstraction. In this paper, we present WikiHow, a dataset of more than 230,000 article and summary pairs extracted and constructed from an online knowledge base written by different human authors. The articles span a wide range of topics and therefore represent high diversity styles. We evaluate the performance of the existing methods on WikiHow to present its challenges and set some baselines to further improve it.

This paper introduces an advanced methodology for machine translation (MT) corpus generation, integrating semi-automated, human-in-the-loop post-editing with large language models (LLMs) to enhance efficiency and translation quality. Building upon previous work that utilized real-time training of a custom MT quality estimation metric, this system incorporates novel LLM features such as Enhanced Translation Synthesis and Assisted Annotation Analysis, which improve initial translation hypotheses and quality assessments, respectively. Additionally, the system employs LLM-Driven Pseudo Labeling and a Translation Recommendation System to reduce human annotator workload in specific contexts. These improvements not only retain the original benefits of cost reduction and enhanced post-edit quality but also open new avenues for leveraging cutting-edge LLM advancements. The project's source code is available for community use, promoting collaborative developments in the field. The demo video can be accessed here.

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we focus on machine translation (MT), a task that has been shown to benefit from in-context translation examples. However no systematic studies have been published on how best to select examples, and mixed results have been reported on the usefulness of similarity-based selection over random selection. We provide a study covering multiple LLMs and multiple in-context example retrieval strategies, comparing multilingual sentence embeddings. We cover several language directions, representing different levels of language resourcedness (English into French, German, Swahili and Wolof). Contrarily to previously published results, we find that sentence embedding similarity can improve MT, especially for low-resource language directions, and discuss the balance between selection pool diversity and quality. We also highlight potential problems with the evaluation of LLM-based MT and suggest a more appropriate evaluation protocol, adapting the COMET metric to the evaluation of LLMs. Code and outputs are freely available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/ICL-MT.

Recently, speech-to-text translation has attracted more and more attention and many studies have emerged rapidly. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on direct speech translation aiming to summarize the current state-of-the-art techniques. First, we categorize the existing research work into three directions based on the main challenges -- modeling burden, data scarcity, and application issues. To tackle the problem of modeling burden, two main structures have been proposed, encoder-decoder framework (Transformer and the variants) and multitask frameworks. For the challenge of data scarcity, recent work resorts to many sophisticated techniques, such as data augmentation, pre-training, knowledge distillation, and multilingual modeling. We analyze and summarize the application issues, which include real-time, segmentation, named entity, gender bias, and code-switching. Finally, we discuss some promising directions for future work.

This report provides a preliminary evaluation of ChatGPT for machine translation, including translation prompt, multilingual translation, and translation robustness. We adopt the prompts advised by ChatGPT to trigger its translation ability and find that the candidate prompts generally work well and show minor performance differences. By evaluating on a number of benchmark test sets, we find that ChatGPT performs competitively with commercial translation products (e.g., Google Translate) on high-resource European languages but lags behind significantly on low-resource or distant languages. For distant languages, we explore an interesting strategy named pivot~prompting that asks ChatGPT to translate the source sentence into a high-resource pivot language before into the target language, which improves the translation performance significantly. As for the translation robustness, ChatGPT does not perform as well as the commercial systems on biomedical abstracts or Reddit comments but exhibits good results on spoken language. With the launch of the GPT-4 engine, the translation performance of ChatGPT is significantly boosted, becoming comparable to commercial translation products, even for distant languages. In other words, ChatGPT~has~already~become~a~good~translator! Scripts and data: https://github.com/wxjiao/Is-ChatGPT-A-Good-Translator

We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to construct high-quality synthetic data grounded in world knowledge for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given documents from a web corpus, we generate and curate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach proposed by Li et al.(2023a), and rewrite the responses to improve their quality further based on the initial documents. Fine-tuning with the resulting (backtranslated instruction, rewritten response) pairs yields higher win rates on AlpacaEval than using other common instruction datasets such as Humpback, ShareGPT, Open Orca, Alpaca-GPT4 and Self-instruct. We also demonstrate that rewriting the responses with an LLM outperforms direct distillation, and the two generated text distributions exhibit significant distinction in embedding space. Further analysis shows that our backtranslated instructions are of higher quality than other sources of synthetic instructions, while our responses are more diverse and complex than those obtained from distillation. Overall we find that instruction back-and-forth translation combines the best of both worlds -- making use of the information diversity and quantity found on the web, while ensuring the quality of the responses which is necessary for effective alignment.

Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrating superior translation performance and long-context capabilities, evaluation methodologies remain constrained to sentence-level assessment due to dataset limitations, token number restrictions in metrics, and rigid sentence boundary requirements. We introduce SEGALE, an evaluation scheme that extends existing automatic metrics to long-document translation by treating documents as continuous text and applying sentence segmentation and alignment methods. Our approach enables previously unattainable document-level evaluation, handling translations of arbitrary length generated with document-level prompts while accounting for under-/over-translations and varied sentence boundaries. Experiments show our scheme significantly outperforms existing long-form document evaluation schemes, while being comparable to evaluations performed with groundtruth sentence alignments. Additionally, we apply our scheme to book-length texts and newly demonstrate that many open-weight LLMs fail to effectively translate documents at their reported maximum context lengths.

While the progress of machine translation of written text has come far in the past several years thanks to the increasing availability of parallel corpora and corpora-based training technologies, automatic translation of spoken text and dialogues remains challenging even for modern systems. In this paper, we aim to boost the machine translation quality of conversational texts by introducing a newly constructed Japanese-English business conversation parallel corpus. A detailed analysis of the corpus is provided along with challenging examples for automatic translation. We also experiment with adding the corpus in a machine translation training scenario and show how the resulting system benefits from its use.

The world's more than 7000 languages are written in at least 293 scripts. Due to various reasons, many closely related languages use different scripts, which poses a difficulty for multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) in learning crosslingual knowledge through lexical overlap. As a consequence, mPLMs are faced with a script barrier: representations from different scripts are located in different subspaces, which can result in crosslingual transfer involving languages of different scripts performing suboptimally. To address this problem, we propose TransliCo, a framework that optimizes the Transliteration Contrastive Modeling (TCM) objective to fine-tune an mPLM by contrasting sentences in its training data and their transliterations in a unified script (in our case Latin), which enhances uniformity in the representation space for different scripts. Using Glot500-m, an mPLM pretrained on over 500 languages, as our source model, we fine-tune it on a small portion (5%) of its training data, and refer to the resulting model as Furina. We show that Furina not only better aligns representations from distinct scripts but also outperforms the original Glot500-m on various zero-shot crosslingual transfer tasks. Additionally, we achieve consistent improvement in a case study on the Indic group where the languages exhibit areal features but use different scripts. We make our code and models publicly available.

As part of the Open Language Data Initiative shared tasks, we have expanded the FLORES+ evaluation set to include Emakhuwa, a low-resource language widely spoken in Mozambique. We translated the dev and devtest sets from Portuguese into Emakhuwa, and we detail the translation process and quality assurance measures used. Our methodology involved various quality checks, including post-editing and adequacy assessments. The resulting datasets consist of multiple reference sentences for each source. We present baseline results from training a Neural Machine Translation system and fine-tuning existing multilingual translation models. Our findings suggest that spelling inconsistencies remain a challenge in Emakhuwa. Additionally, the baseline models underperformed on this evaluation set, underscoring the necessity for further research to enhance machine translation quality for Emakhuwa. The data is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LIACC/Emakhuwa-FLORES.

Sequential recommendation systems aim to provide personalized recommendations for users based on their interaction history. To achieve this, they often incorporate auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and auxiliary tasks, like predicting user preferences and intent. Despite numerous efforts to enhance these models, they still suffer from limited personalization. To address this issue, we propose a new paradigm, which we term preference discerning. In preference dscerning, we explicitly condition a generative sequential recommendation system on user preferences within its context. To this end, we generate user preferences using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on user reviews and item-specific data. To evaluate preference discerning capabilities of sequential recommendation systems, we introduce a novel benchmark that provides a holistic evaluation across various scenarios, including preference steering and sentiment following. We assess current state-of-the-art methods using our benchmark and show that they struggle to accurately discern user preferences. Therefore, we propose a new method named Mender (Multimodal Preference discerner), which improves upon existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark. Our results show that Mender can be effectively guided by human preferences even though they have not been observed during training, paving the way toward more personalized sequential recommendation systems. We will open-source the code and benchmarks upon publication.

Sequential recommendation aims to model user preferences based on historical behavior sequences, which is crucial for various online platforms. Data sparsity remains a significant challenge in this area as most users have limited interactions and many items receive little attention. To mitigate this issue, contrastive learning has been widely adopted. By constructing positive sample pairs from the data itself and maximizing their agreement in the embedding space,it can leverage available data more effectively. Constructing reasonable positive sample pairs is crucial for the success of contrastive learning. However, current approaches struggle to generate reliable positive pairs as they either rely on representations learned from inherently sparse collaborative signals or use random perturbations which introduce significant uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach named Semantic Retrieval Augmented Contrastive Learning (SRA-CL), which leverages semantic information to improve the reliability of contrastive samples. SRA-CL comprises two main components: (1) Cross-Sequence Contrastive Learning via User Semantic Retrieval, which utilizes large language models (LLMs) to understand diverse user preferences and retrieve semantically similar users to form reliable positive samples through a learnable sample synthesis method; and (2) Intra-Sequence Contrastive Learning via Item Semantic Retrieval, which employs LLMs to comprehend items and retrieve similar items to perform semantic-based item substitution, thereby creating semantically consistent augmented views for contrastive learning. SRA-CL is plug-and-play and can be integrated into standard sequential recommendation models. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed approach.

In multi-source sequence-to-sequence tasks, the attention mechanism can be modeled in several ways. This topic has been thoroughly studied on recurrent architectures. In this paper, we extend the previous work to the encoder-decoder attention in the Transformer architecture. We propose four different input combination strategies for the encoder-decoder attention: serial, parallel, flat, and hierarchical. We evaluate our methods on tasks of multimodal translation and translation with multiple source languages. The experiments show that the models are able to use multiple sources and improve over single source baselines.

A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations -- 11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages -- the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity than ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 26 of 34 translation directions.

Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.

This paper describes Lingua Custodia's submission to the WMT21 shared task on machine translation using terminologies. We consider three directions, namely English to French, Russian, and Chinese. We rely on a Transformer-based architecture as a building block, and we explore a method which introduces two main changes to the standard procedure to handle terminologies. The first one consists in augmenting the training data in such a way as to encourage the model to learn a copy behavior when it encounters terminology constraint terms. The second change is constraint token masking, whose purpose is to ease copy behavior learning and to improve model generalization. Empirical results show that our method satisfies most terminology constraints while maintaining high translation quality.

Transformer models using segment-based processing have been an effective architecture for simultaneous speech translation. However, such models create a context mismatch between training and inference environments, hindering potential translation accuracy. We solve this issue by proposing Shiftable Context, a simple yet effective scheme to ensure that consistent segment and context sizes are maintained throughout training and inference, even with the presence of partially filled segments due to the streaming nature of simultaneous translation. Shiftable Context is also broadly applicable to segment-based transformers for streaming tasks. Our experiments on the English-German, English-French, and English-Spanish language pairs from the MUST-C dataset demonstrate that when applied to the Augmented Memory Transformer, a state-of-the-art model for simultaneous speech translation, the proposed scheme achieves an average increase of 2.09, 1.83, and 1.95 BLEU scores across each wait-k value for the three language pairs, respectively, with a minimal impact on computation-aware Average Lagging.

The development of monolingual language models for low and mid-resource languages continues to be hindered by the difficulty in sourcing high-quality training data. In this study, we present a novel cross-lingual vocabulary transfer strategy, trans-tokenization, designed to tackle this challenge and enable more efficient language adaptation. Our approach focuses on adapting a high-resource monolingual LLM to an unseen target language by initializing the token embeddings of the target language using a weighted average of semantically similar token embeddings from the source language. For this, we leverage a translation resource covering both the source and target languages. We validate our method with the Tweeties, a series of trans-tokenized LLMs, and demonstrate their competitive performance on various downstream tasks across a small but diverse set of languages. Additionally, we introduce Hydra LLMs, models with multiple swappable language modeling heads and embedding tables, which further extend the capabilities of our trans-tokenization strategy. By designing a Hydra LLM based on the multilingual model TowerInstruct, we developed a state-of-the-art machine translation model for Tatar, in a zero-shot manner, completely bypassing the need for high-quality parallel data. This breakthrough is particularly significant for low-resource languages like Tatar, where high-quality parallel data is hard to come by. By lowering the data and time requirements for training high-quality models, our trans-tokenization strategy allows for the development of LLMs for a wider range of languages, especially those with limited resources. We hope that our work will inspire further research and collaboration in the field of cross-lingual vocabulary transfer and contribute to the empowerment of languages on a global scale.

We introduce Delayed Streams Modeling (DSM), a flexible formulation for streaming, multimodal sequence-to-sequence learning. Sequence-to-sequence generation is often cast in an offline manner, where the model consumes the complete input sequence before generating the first output timestep. Alternatively, streaming sequence-to-sequence rely on learning a policy for choosing when to advance on the input stream, or write to the output stream. DSM instead models already time-aligned streams with a decoder-only language model. By moving the alignment to a pre-processing step,and introducing appropriate delays between streams, DSM provides streaming inference of arbitrary output sequences, from any input combination, making it applicable to many sequence-to-sequence problems. In particular, given text and audio streams, automatic speech recognition (ASR) corresponds to the text stream being delayed, while the opposite gives a text-to-speech (TTS) model. We perform extensive experiments for these two major sequence-to-sequence tasks, showing that DSM provides state-of-the-art performance and latency while supporting arbitrary long sequences, being even competitive with offline baselines. Code, samples and demos are available at https://github.com/kyutai-labs/delayed-streams-modeling

Recent research on sequence labelling has been exploring different strategies to mitigate the lack of manually annotated data for the large majority of the world languages. Among others, the most successful approaches have been based on (i) the cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models (model-transfer), (ii) data translation and label projection (data-transfer) and (iii), prompt-based learning by reusing the mask objective to exploit the few-shot capabilities of pre-trained language models (few-shot). Previous work seems to conclude that model-transfer outperforms data-transfer methods and that few-shot techniques based on prompting are superior to updating the model's weights via fine-tuning. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that, for Argument Mining, a sequence labelling task which requires the detection of long and complex discourse structures, previous insights on cross-lingual transfer or few-shot learning do not apply. Contrary to previous work, we show that for Argument Mining data transfer obtains better results than model-transfer and that fine-tuning outperforms few-shot methods. Regarding the former, the domain of the dataset used for data-transfer seems to be a deciding factor, while, for few-shot, the type of task (length and complexity of the sequence spans) and sampling method prove to be crucial.

Countless learning tasks require dealing with sequential data. Image captioning, speech synthesis, and music generation all require that a model produce outputs that are sequences. In other domains, such as time series prediction, video analysis, and musical information retrieval, a model must learn from inputs that are sequences. Interactive tasks, such as translating natural language, engaging in dialogue, and controlling a robot, often demand both capabilities. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dynamics of sequences via cycles in the network of nodes. Unlike standard feedforward neural networks, recurrent networks retain a state that can represent information from an arbitrarily long context window. Although recurrent neural networks have traditionally been difficult to train, and often contain millions of parameters, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful large-scale learning with them. In recent years, systems based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional (BRNN) architectures have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on tasks as varied as image captioning, language translation, and handwriting recognition. In this survey, we review and synthesize the research that over the past three decades first yielded and then made practical these powerful learning models. When appropriate, we reconcile conflicting notation and nomenclature. Our goal is to provide a self-contained explication of the state of the art together with a historical perspective and references to primary research.

In recent years, the emergence of large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, has shown impressive capabilities in complex problems, e.g., mathematics and coding. Some pioneering studies attempt to bring the success of LRMs in neural machine translation (MT). They try to build LRMs with deep reasoning MT ability via reinforcement learning (RL). Despite some progress that has been made, these attempts generally focus on several high-resource languages, e.g., English and Chinese, leaving the performance on other languages unclear. Besides, the reward modeling methods in previous work do not fully unleash the potential of reinforcement learning in MT. In this work, we first design a new reward modeling method that compares the translation results of the policy MT model with a strong LRM (i.e., DeepSeek-R1-671B), and quantifies the comparisons to provide rewards. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the reward modeling method. Using Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct as the backbone, the trained model achieves the new state-of-the-art performance in literary translation, and outperforms strong LRMs including OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeeK-R1. Furthermore, we extend our method to the multilingual settings with 11 languages. With a carefully designed lightweight reward modeling in RL, we can simply transfer the strong MT ability from a single direction into multiple (i.e., 90) translation directions and achieve impressive multilingual MT performance.

It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions, underperforming phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) and requiring large amounts of auxiliary data to achieve competitive results. In this paper, we re-assess the validity of these results, arguing that they are the result of lack of system adaptation to low-resource settings. We discuss some pitfalls to be aware of when training low-resource NMT systems, and recent techniques that have shown to be especially helpful in low-resource settings, resulting in a set of best practices for low-resource NMT. In our experiments on German--English with different amounts of IWSLT14 training data, we show that, without the use of any auxiliary monolingual or multilingual data, an optimized NMT system can outperform PBSMT with far less data than previously claimed. We also apply these techniques to a low-resource Korean-English dataset, surpassing previously reported results by 4 BLEU.

This paper describes the system we developed for SemEval-2024 Task 1, "Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages." The aim of the task is to build a model that can identify semantic textual relatedness (STR) between two sentences of a target language belonging to a collection of African and Asian languages. We participated in Subtasks A and C and explored supervised and cross-lingual training leveraging large language models (LLMs). Pre-trained large language models have been extensively used for machine translation and semantic similarity. Using a combination of machine translation and sentence embedding LLMs, we developed a unified STR model, TranSem, for subtask A and fine-tuned the T5 family of models on the STR data, FineSem, for use in subtask C. Our model results for 7 languages in subtask A were better than the official baseline for 3 languages and on par with the baseline for the remaining 4 languages. Our model results for the 12 languages in subtask C resulted in 1st place for Africaans, 2nd place for Indonesian, and 3rd place for English with low performance for the remaining 9 languages.

We present a new open-source parallel corpus consisting of news articles collected from the Bianet magazine, an online newspaper that publishes Turkish news, often along with their translations in English and Kurdish. In this paper, we describe the collection process of the corpus and its statistical properties. We validate the benefit of using the Bianet corpus by evaluating bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation models in English-Turkish and English-Kurdish directions.

In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model called RNN Encoder-Decoder that consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNN). One RNN encodes a sequence of symbols into a fixed-length vector representation, and the other decodes the representation into another sequence of symbols. The encoder and decoder of the proposed model are jointly trained to maximize the conditional probability of a target sequence given a source sequence. The performance of a statistical machine translation system is empirically found to improve by using the conditional probabilities of phrase pairs computed by the RNN Encoder-Decoder as an additional feature in the existing log-linear model. Qualitatively, we show that the proposed model learns a semantically and syntactically meaningful representation of linguistic phrases.

One of the biggest challenges hindering progress in low-resource and multilingual machine translation is the lack of good evaluation benchmarks. Current evaluation benchmarks either lack good coverage of low-resource languages, consider only restricted domains, or are low quality because they are constructed using semi-automatic procedures. In this work, we introduce the FLORES-101 evaluation benchmark, consisting of 3001 sentences extracted from English Wikipedia and covering a variety of different topics and domains. These sentences have been translated in 101 languages by professional translators through a carefully controlled process. The resulting dataset enables better assessment of model quality on the long tail of low-resource languages, including the evaluation of many-to-many multilingual translation systems, as all translations are multilingually aligned. By publicly releasing such a high-quality and high-coverage dataset, we hope to foster progress in the machine translation community and beyond.

Due to reasons of convenience and lack of tech literacy, transliteration (i.e., Romanizing native scripts instead of using localization tools) is eminently prevalent in the context of low-resource languages such as Sinhala, which have their own writing script. In this study, our focus is on Romanized Sinhala transliteration. We propose two methods to address this problem: Our baseline is a rule-based method, which is then compared against our second method where we approach the transliteration problem as a sequence-to-sequence task akin to the established Neural Machine Translation (NMT) task. For the latter, we propose a Transformer-based Encode-Decoder solution. We witnessed that the Transformer-based method could grab many ad-hoc patterns within the Romanized scripts compared to the rule-based method. The code base associated with this paper is available on GitHub - https://github.com/kasunw22/Sinhala-Transliterator/